Ariana Grande has been slammed by the family of Tony Hughes after the popstar named infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer as her “dream dinner guest”.
Grande, 31, made the controversial comments on the Podcrushed podcast with hosts Penn Badgley, Sophie Ansari and Nava Kavelin earlier this week.
Hughes, who was deaf and non-verbal, was 31 when he was killed by Dahmer after meeting him at a gay bar in 1991.
Speaking to TMZ, Tony’s mother Shirley Hughes said Grande’s statements left her feeling emotional and disturbed.
“To me, it seems like she’s sick in her mind,” she told the outlet. “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 said that Grande’s comments glamorize Dahmer and called on the Wicked star to apologize. The Independent has contacted Grande’s representatives for comment.
“I was infatuated with serial killers when I was younger,” Grande said on Podcrushed. Recalling a Q&A she took part in when she was younger, she added: “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?’
“... And I was like, ‘I mean, Jeffrey Dahmer is pretty fascinating.’”
The singer told the podcast hosts that she would still like to meet Dahmer, although he was beaten to death three years into his prison sentence in 1994.
Dahmer killed and dismembered 17 men between 1978 and 1991.
The Hughes family expressed similar outrage when Evan Peters won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of the killer in Ryan Murphy’s dramatization, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.
“There’s a lot of sick people around the world, and people winning acting roles from playing killers keeps the obsession going and this makes sick people thrive on the fame,” Shirley told TMZ at the time. “It’s a shame that people can take our tragedy and make money. The victims never saw a cent. We go through these emotions every day.”
The 10-part series, which depicted in gruesome detail Dahmer’s killing spree in Milwaukee, broke streaming records when it was released in 2022.
Peters released a promotional video stating that the filmmakers felt it was important to be “respectful to the victims, to the victims’ families.”
However, families said they were blindsided by the show and were not notified it was being released. In an essay for Insider, Rita Isbell, the sister of Dahmer’s victim Errol Lindsay, also accused Netflix of trying to “make money off of this tragedy”.
“I feel like Netflix should’ve asked if we mind or how we felt about making it. They didn’t ask me anything. They just did it,” she wrote.
