Ariana Grande managed to raise some serious eyebrows when she was asked on Penn Badgley’s podcast in June 2024 whom she would most like to have dinner with. She replied:
“Jeffrey Dahmer’s pretty fascinating. I really wish I could have met him.”
The mother of Tony Hughes, one of the men Jeffrey Dahmer murdered, criticised Grande last week, calling the singer “sick in her mind.” Tony’s sister, Barbara, told TMZ that she hopes Grande will apologise for her comments, and both shared disappointment in the singer’s apparent lack of empathy for the victims’ families. “Unfortunately, until it happens to her and her family, she just doesn’t know what we have been through,” Barbara said.
Jeffrey Dahmer murdered seventeen boys and young men between 1978 and 1991, mainly people of colour, and after his arrest spoke freely about consuming body parts from some of them.
According to Grande, her fascination with Dahmer began “years ago before the [Netflix] Dahmer series,” and she had mentioned it to young fans when she was a Nickelodeon star.
In the podcast, Grande suggested she would like to meet Dahmer, but “maybe with a third party or someone involved. I have questions,” she added.
Grande is a big deal in the world of celebs. She had reportedly sold over 85 million records and accrued 98 billion streams (so far), making her one of the most-streamed artists of all time. She was the most-streamed female act of the 2010s and has the second most songs with over a billion streams for a woman. Grande also has a massive social media following; with over 380 million followers, she is the sixth-most-followed individual on Instagram and one of the most-subscribed and most followed musicians on YouTube and Spotify.
I guess that keeps her busy, because honestly there is so much Dahmerabilia on the web that having dinner with him would be unnecessary (and messy, since he had his head caved in by another prisoner in 1994). Ryan Murphy made a hugely popular re-enactment of the case for Netflix in 2022, although it had been done before and rather well by Jeremy Renner (playing Dahmer) in a movie made by David Jacobson in 2002. Then there are the tape recordings – his defence team released their tapes of interviews with him a few weeks after the Ryan Murphy doco went to air. In 2023, Dahmer’s dad released his own interview tapes together with home movies etc, on Fox Nation. In prison, before his death, Dahmer was open and transparent about his activities with a range of interviewers. Not sure how much was left to uncover over a nice dinner of fava beans and a big Amaroni?
Some of the news reports have rather pompously asked if her preference for a cannibal for dinner means that she is therefore a cannibal herself? Well sorry guys, but we happen to know that Ariana is a vegan, and has been since watching the documentary Forks Over Knives in 2013. Ariana told a UK paper:
“I love animals more than I love most people, not kidding.”
She insists that (besides being kinder to animals and better for the environment) going vegan has improved her health immensely.
“The way I’m eating now has actually helped even out my blood sugar. As some of you guys may know, I’ve struggled with awful hypoglycemia for my whole life and it’s improved a ton since I changed my eating habits.”
Would Ariana eat a human at her dinner with Dahmer? About as likely as her eating a cow or a pig!
The Cannibal Guy 