Chappell Roan has confronted the photographer who reportedly yelled at her during a run-in at the MTV Music Video Awards last month.
The 26-year-old “Pink Pony Club” musician, who has soared to international fame in recent months with her debut album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, had a heated exchange with a member of the paparazzi at the VMAs ceremony in September, when she snapped back at them, saying, “You shut the f*** up. No, not me, b***h.”
The same photographer appeared to be working while Roan, real name is Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, was walking the red carpet for the premiere of Olivia Rodrigo’s tour movie, GUTS, on Friday night (25 October).
In a clip shared online, Roan is seen posing on the red carpet before she points directly at one photographer, approaches them and says, “You were so disrespectful to me at the VMAs”.
“You yelled at me at the VMAs. Yes, you did. I remember. You were so rude to me. And I deserve an apology for that. You need to apologise to me,” Roan said.
It’s unclear from the video whether the photographer apologised to Roan, but another person could be seen attempting to intervene before the clip ended.
Friday’s incident comes one month after Roan cancelled scheduled dates at festivals in New York and Columbia in September, telling her fans that fame had become “overwhelming.”
Speaking about why she initially snapped at the photographer in September, Roan told Entertainment Tonight: “I think for someone who gets a lot of anxiety around people yelling at you … the carpet is horrifying, and I yelled back. You don’t get to yell at me like that.”
She added that she finds the environment of the red carpet events “overwhelming and quite scary”.
In August, the singer hinted she had been left uncomfortable by fandom culture, and called out invasive fan behaviour in a statement: “Please stop touching me. Please stop being weird to my family and friends. Please stop assuming things about me.”
Speaking to The Guardian just weeks around the time of her show cancellations, Roan spoke candidly about witnessing her life completely change due to the perils of being in the public eye.
“I’m in therapy twice a week. I went to a psychiatrist last week because I was like, I don’t know what’s going on. She diagnosed me with severe depression – which I didn’t think I had because I’m not actually sad,” she explained.
“But I have every symptom of someone who’s severely depressed,” she said, pointing towards symptoms of brain fog, poor focus and “a very lacklustre viewpoint”.
Roan explained that she thinks her mental health has been impacted because her “whole life has changed”.
“I’m very turned off by the celebrity of it all,” said Roan. “Some girls have been in this so long that they’re used to that, but I’m not that girl. I’m not gonna be a sweetie pie to a man who’s telling me to shut the f*** up.”
She added that she was warned by people in the music industry that fame feels like “going through puberty again”.
She continued: “My body does feel different. It’s holding tension in a very different way: I have all these new emotions and I’m really confused. It’s how it felt to be 12. I look at [Lady] Gaga and even Sabrina [Carpenter] and Lana [Del Rey] – when I see them going out in public, I can’t even imagine how much they’ve had to prepare for that.”
