Francia Raisa, the actress who gave Selena Gomez a new lease on life by donating a kidney to her, is speaking out about rumors of a feud between the two.
The 37-year-old actress was featured in a new interview in which she claimed that reports of her falling out with Gomez were just 'rumors'.
Raisa also referenced Gomez's then-upcoming wedding to Benny Blanco, which she reportedly did not attend.
In her place were numerous A-listers, including Taylor Swift, Gomez's Only Murders In The Building co-stars Steve Martin and Martin Short, Zoe Saldaña, Paris and Nicky Hilton and Ed Sheeran, among others.
In the interview, which was apparently filmed at an event in a bookstore, Raisa wished Gomez the best ahead of her wedding while speaking in Spanish.
'I know she's getting married, and I'm very happy for her. And look... she has a life and she is already a billionaire and I am grateful that I could do that for her,' she said, according to translated subtitles.
After she was asked what she would say to anyone considering organ donation, Raisa emphasized that the process is about saving someone's life, rather than creating a special bond with them.
'Look, from the beginning the doctors told me, it's a donation,' she explained.
'If you are going to donate a dollar to St. Jude or somewhere else, you're not going to call to say, "Hey, what are you doing with my dollar?"
'It's a donation and it's something nice that I was able to do,' she said of the kidney she gave to Gomez. 'I am grateful that I am alive and I can say that I have saved a life.'
Raisa also suggested that organ donation could be 'more difficult' for women compared to men, though she didn't expand on what might cause that gender divide.
The How I Met Your Father actress had a forceful response when she was asked about reports that she had gotten 'angry' with Gomez over how she was treating her body after receiving her kidney.
'Well, right now what you are asking me is nonsense that has been in the media, and there are too many rumors,' she responded coldly. 'I've never said anything.'
'When that rumor came out that I had gotten angry or something like that because [Gomez] was smoking, I wasn't aware of those rumors,' Raisa added.
'No one knows what's going on, and neither she nor I are talking about it,' she continued, adding, 'One day, maybe we will address it.'
Raisa donated a kidney to Gomez in 2017 after the Spring Breakers star had been diagnosed with lupus.
Sufferers of the disease have hyperactive immune systems that can attack their healthy tissues and organs, including kidneys.
In a 2018 interview, Raisa admitted that both she and Gomez fell into a bout of depression following the kidney donation procedure, which nearly killed Gomez after one of her arteries burst in the middle of surgery.
Raisa recalled the warning that a social worker gave her before the surgery.
'It’s going to be hard, the recipient is going to glow and she’s going to recover a lot faster than the donor because she’s getting something she needs and you are losing something you don’t need to lose. It’s going to be hard,' she recalled being told in an interview with SELF.
'And it was hard,' Raisa continued, adding, 'Selena and I both went through a depression.'
Raisa also raised her shirt and lowered her pants to reveal a mark resembling a 'C-section' scar, as well as smaller scars higher on her stomach.
She also noted that Gomez had a large scar on the inside of her thigh that was from the emergency surgery to repair her rupture artery.
In the same interview, Raisa mentioned that it was Gomez who informed her that she was a matched for the kidney donation, rather than doctors, which led some fans to worry that she may have felt pressured to agree to the donation while speaking to Gomez.
In 2022, Raisa and Gomez were rumored to be feuding after Gomez said in a Rolling Stone interview that 'My only friend in the industry really is Taylor [Swift], so I remember feeling like I didn’t belong.'
'Interesting,' Raisa wrote in a since-deleted comment on a post about the quotation.
In response to Raisa's comment, Gomez replied, 'Sorry I didn't mention every person I know.'
But the following year, the two tried to tamp down any talk of a feud.
'I will never, ever, ever be more in debt to a person that Francia,' Gomez said in her Apple TV+ docuseries Dear... 'The idea of someone not even second-guessing to be a donor was unbelievably overwhelming.'
The same year, Raisa emphasized that she was not 'forced' into donating her kidney.
'It came out of the genuine kindness of my heart, and I’ve been super blessed ever since,' she said in an interview on the Good Guys podcast.
In December 2023, Raisa admitted that she and Gomez had been distant in recent years, but she confirmed that they were still friends.
'We hadn’t spoken much in six years. Especially [in] the last year, we didn’t speak at all,' she told USA Today, though she said that they had made up around her 35th birthday. 'We’ve never really had beef with each other. Nothing happened, and if you ask either of us, we don’t know what happened, but we needed that time apart. Then when you come back together, you’re better people.'
In 2024, she told E! News that she and Gomez could go long periods of time without talking despite still being friends.
'One of the best, the best friendships that I know, you go a year without talking, and then when you see each other again, it’s like you never went a day without talking. So, that’s where it’s at,' she said of her relationship with Gomez.
Raisa also noted that, although she and Gomez were close, she wasn't close with Gomez's other celebrity friends.
Raisa went unmentioned among the notable guests at Gomez's wedding to Benny Blanco, and fans noticed that she shared a video on Instagram of herself dancing with a choreographer around the time of the wedding, suggesting that she was elsewhere.
