Ariana Grande’s recent comment about Jeffrey Dahmer isn’t sitting well with the family of one of his victims.
The “Boyfriend” singer landed some rather condemnatory remarks on Thursday from the family of Tony Hughes, a deaf, nonverbal man murdered by the late serial killer in 1991, as Grande divulged last week that she’d invite Dahmer for dinner if she could.
“To me, it seems like she’s sick in her mind,” the victim’s mother, Shirley Hughes, told TMZ on Thursday. “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.”
Grande admitted as much last Monday on Penn Badgley’s “Podcrushed” podcast. The 31-year-old Grammy winner, who recalled being at a Nickelodeon fan convention where a child asked about her dream dinner guest, laughed while telling her story.
“I was like, ‘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,’” she said. “The parents were like, ‘We’ll explain it later, sweetie.’”
Shirley told TMZ she wants Grande to understand how hurtful her comments were, and further noted that she and other victims’ families feel genuine pain whenever Dahmer is mentioned.
The victim’s sister, Barbara Hughes-Holt, added that Grande’s remark glamorizes the notorious serial killer: “Unfortunately, until it happens to her and her family, she just doesn’t know what we have been through.”
HuffPost has reached out to representatives for Grande for comment.
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Shirley Hughes previously criticized the Golden Globes when Evan Peters, who portrayed the serial killer in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” won the award for best actor in a limited or anthology series or television film in 2023.
“It’s a shame that people can take our tragedy and make money,” she told TMZ at the time. “The victims never saw a cent. We go through these emotions every day.”
“I don’t see how they can do that,” Shirley Hughes told The Guardian in 2022 about the Netflix series. “I don’t see how they can use our names and put stuff out like that out there.”
Dahmer, also known as the “Milwaukee Cannibal,” killed 17 people between 1978 and 1991. He was convicted on 15 counts of murder and sentenced in 1992 to 15 life terms in prison, but was beaten to death in 1994 while incarcerated at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.