Francia Raisa shuts down rumors that she was pressured to donate her kidney to Selena Gomez: 'No one forced me to do anything'

• Francia Raisa has said that she was not pressured to donate her kidney to Selena Gomez in 2017.
• On the "Good Guys" podcast, she cleared up rumors about the transplant and her friendship with Gomez.
• "No one forced me to do anything. It came out of the genuine kindness of my heart," Raisa said.

Francia Raisa has said that she was not pressured to donate her kidney to Selena Gomez.

Speaking to actor Josh Peck and influencer Ben Soffer on the "Good Guys" podcast, the "How I Met Your Father" actor was asked about giving up one of her organs for her best friend back in 2017, and the rumored fallout she and Gomez had in the years following.

"I've said this before, I just felt it in my heart," Raisa said of her decision to donate her kidney. "I knew I was a match. I knew it was gonna happen." 

"No one forced me to do anything. It came out of the genuine kindness of my heart," she added.

After Gomez was diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune disease that affects around 1.5 million people in America, sometime between 2012 and early 2014, she discovered that she needed a kidney transplant due to complications from the disease. 

Raisa, who at that point had been friends with Gomez for more than a decade, and was living with her at the time, offered to get tested so that the "Only Murders in the Building" actor wouldn't have to wait to find a donor.

As Raisa told Peck and Soffer on the podcast, the "minute I found out we were a match," she made up her mind to go ahead with the operation.

However, in a 2018 interview, Raisa said that Gomez was informed by doctors that she was a compatible organ donor before she was.

"When I found out I was a match, it wasn't in the way I'd expected," she told Self. "I had a way that I wanted to tell her when I made the decision. I knew it was going to happen, I just needed time."

The transplant took place on June 19, 2017, and both Gomez and Raisa commemorated the surgery by getting the date tattooed on their upper arms.

Raisa's father, radio personality Renán Almendárez Coello, said in 2022 that in the years following the surgery, the two friends had a falling out because of Gomez's drinking habits.

"There was a little disagreement when Selena was drinking. Francia told her that she wasn't given a kidney to drink alcohol," he said on the Spanish-language news program  "Primer Impacto." 

It appears that the rift between the two has been mended. On July 26, Gomez shared a birthday tribute to Raisa. 

"Happiest of birthdays to this special human being. No matter where life takes us, I love you," she wrote alongside a carousel of photos of the two of them together.