Ariana Grande has angered the families of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims after she revealed her fascination with the serial killer.
During Grande’s appearance on Penn Badgley’s “Podcrushed” earlier this month, the singer admitted that she was “infatuated” by serial killers when she was “younger.” Grande, 31, recalled early on in her career being asked during a Q&A event by a young fan with her parents who was her dream dinner party guest.
“I was like, ‘Oh, you’re so cute. Mom and Dad, is it OK if I give the real answer?’” Grande recalled. “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.’”
Grande explained her response didn’t go over well at the time. Dahmer notoriously murdered 17 men and children from 1978 to 1991 and partook in torture, dismemberment, sexual assault and cannibalism. Dahmer was sentenced to life in prison in 1992 and was beaten to death by inmates two years later.
The singer’s interest in the serial killer didn’t sit right with Shirley Hughes, who was the mother of Tony Hughes, a deaf, non-verbal man who Dahmer killed in 1991. Hughes slammed Grande’s recent comments about Dahmer.
“To me, it seems like she’s sick in her mind,” Shirley said of Grande to TMZ on Thursday, June 27. “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.”
Tony’s sister, Barbara, echoed similar sentiments and called out Grande for glamorizing Dahmer. She also shared that she would like to see Grande apologize for her remarks.
Grande has not addressed the backlash.
Grande is not the only star with an interest in Dahmer’s history. Over the years, several movies and TV series have been made about the serial killer. Most recently, Ryan Murphy made the 2022 series, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, starring Evan Peters as the infamous murderer. The Netflix show earned its fair share of criticism from viewers and many family members of Dahmer’s victims. Murphy defended the project and shared that they reached out to the families for input but did not hear back.
“It’s something that we researched for a very long time,” Murphy said at a Dahmer event in October 2022. “And we, over the course of the three, three and a half years when we were really writing it, working on it, we reached out to 20 — around 20 of the victims’ families and friends trying to get input, trying to talk to people and not a single person responded to us in that process.”
