After Ariana Grande recalled a moment early in her career when she named Jeffrey Dahmer as a dream dinner guest, family members of the serial killer’s victims have hit out at the singer.
Appearing on Penn Badgley’s podcast, Podcrushed, earlier this month, Grande recounted a time when she was asked who her dream dinner guest – dead or alive – would be, in front of her young fans.
“Jeffrey Dahmer’s pretty fascinating. I think I would’ve loved to have met him,” she said on the second episode of her two-part interview, before joking, “Maybe with a third party or something. I have questions I would have loved [to ask him]. The parents were like, ‘We’ll explain later.’”
Grande admitted that she was “infatuated” with serial killers when she was younger, and clarified that her fascination with Dahmer came before Netflix released The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.
While the hosts laughed off Grande’s comments, the relatives of Tony Hughes, one of Dahmer’s victims, didn’t see the funny side. “To me, it seems like she’s sick in her mind,” Shirley, Tony’s mother, told TMZ. “It’s not fancy or funny to say you would have wanted to do dinner with him. It’s also not something you should say to young people, which she says she did.”
Likewise, Tony’s sister Barbara has said that the comments glamorise Dahmer, and that she’d love to see the former Nickelodeon star apologise.
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After the first episode of the interview was released earlier this month, fans were left confused after Grande appeared to switch her singing voice. She was laughing and speaking in a deeper register than she normally does in public, before switching to a softer, higher voice.
She explained that she’s long done it as a way to protect her voice – it’s been a habit of her’s over the past two years for good “vocal health”.
Recently, You actor Badgley appeared in the music video for Grande’s latest single ‘The Boy Is Mine’, which reimagines the 1998 song of the same name by Brandy and Monica – who themselves have cameos in the music video.
In an inversion of his role in You, Badgley plays a city mayor who’s being stalked by a local resident, played by Grande.
The song is the third single from Grande’s seventh studio album, ‘Eternal Sunshine’, which came out on March 8. In a four-star review of the album, NME said: “It’s the most sophisticated project yet from a preternaturally talented vocalist who keeps getting better. Whatever you take away from it, ‘Eternal Sunshine’ definitely isn’t an album you’ll want to wipe from memory.”