When you think about your dream dinner guest, you might imagine an icon, a late family member, or a historical figure. But for Ariana Grande, it's Jeffrey Dahmer.
During a recent episode of Podcrushed, the pop star, 30, opened up about the time she told a fan that her dream dinner date was with serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
"I was infatuated with serial killers when I was younger,” Grande told podcast co-hosts Penn Badgley, Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari.
The subject came up when she was in a Q&A with "young fans."
“It was in between me being Cat [in Nickelodeon’s Sam & Cat] and pop stuff, so it was like a younger group, and they were with parents, and someone said. ‘If you could have dinner with anyone living or or dead, who would it be?’” she recalled.
Grande continued, “I was like, ‘Oh, you're so cute. Mom and Dad, is it OK if I give the real answer?’ And they were like ‘Sure, what’s the answer?’ and I was like, ‘I mean, Jeffrey Dahmer is pretty fascinating."
"I think I would have loved to have met him. Y’know, maybe with a third party or someone involved. But I have questions,'" she concluded.
Grande's choice of dinner guest ultimately made the podcast hosts laugh, but her answer upset fans' parents in the room.
"The parents were like, 'We’ll explain it later, sweetie.’ And I was like, ‘I’ll just sing ‘Problem’ and go home," the "Positions" musician recalled.
While Sophie and Nava laughed, people online didn't find it funny.
"We are not joking about a serial killer who murdered with impunity because the police did not care about black men and gay men. Kindly f*** off!" one redditor wrote.
"Unless the question is 'which serial killer would you have dinner with' and you have a gun to your head there’s no damn reason to say this," another commented in part.
Someone else said Ariana's comments were "vile" and "horribly offensive" to the families of Dahmer's victims.
"This is so vile," they wrote. "I have a great interest in crime cases but the LAST thing I’d want to do is have dinner with a serial killer. Jeffrey Dahmer was a pedophile who murdered innocent people, mainly people of colour because he knew police wouldn’t take their disappearances as seriously. Joking about wanting to have dinner with him is sick and horribly offensive to the victims’ families, who are still alive and affected by the tragedy fyi. Let’s stop glorifying these psychos and pretending they are intensely enamoring people - they’re not, and if you met them in real life you would quickly realize why."
Even though Grande will never get her questions answered by Dahmer, she has been able to star alongside Evan Peters — who played him in Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story — in the music video for "We Can't Be Friends."
I totally understand people being upset by what she said, and Ariana has been known to ruffle feathers with some of her actions (messing with other people's men, licking donuts).
However as someone who watches a lot of the ID channel, and is quite fascinated by true crime documentaries, I'm not as bothered by what she said.
If I had the opportunity to have dinner with a serial killer, I'd have a lot of questions regarding what motivated them to take the lives of so many innocent people.
She would just need to make sure the food on the plate is actually animal and not human.
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