Ariana Grande has revealed who her dream dinner guest would be and fans are questioning if she should’ve picked someone else.
The “yes, and?” singer recently appeared on the Podcrushed podcast with hosts Penn Badgley, Sophie Ansari and Nava Kavelin where she admitted that she had previously told fans her dream dinner guest was Jeffrey Dahmer, a famous serial killer known for killing and dismembering 17 males between 1978 and 1991.
“I was infatuated with serial killers when I was younger,” Grande said on the podcast. “It was in between me being Cat [on 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 dead, who would it be?’”
“I was like, ‘Oh, you’re so cute,’” she continued, adding that she asked the group of parents if she was allowed to give a truthful answer. “They were like, ‘Sure, what’s the answer?’ and I was like, ‘I mean, Jeffrey Dahmer is pretty fascinating.’”
Her answer remains true as the “thank u, next” singer told the podcast host that she would still like to meet him, although he died three years into his prison sentence in 1994.
“I think I would have loved to have met him,” she said. “You know, maybe with a third party or someone involved. But I have questions.”
However, some people have since turned to Reddit to repost the clip from the podcast episode to question why Dahmer would be her person because of the level of his crimes and could come across as offensive to any of the families of his victims.
“I genuinely do not understand what she was going for here, the families of his victims are still very much alive and have said they hate that people glorify him and make shows about him and forget the victims. She thinks she’s being edgy but she is just a tone-deaf person who doesn’t care about other people’s pain,” one Reddit comment read.
Another commenter agreed, writing, “This is so vile… 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 color 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.”
One commenter pointed out that, despite asking the children’s parents if it would be acceptable to tell them, the singer still went too far.
“There are so many things wrong with that statement,” they wrote. “You said that at Q&A with children and their parents… Of all the people in the world, couldn’t you pick someone that wasn’t a murderer or at least pretended to pick someone more acceptable for your audience…The overexcitement of how she’s saying it now, I’m hoping she didn’t say it that way in the past.”