Ariana Grande has revealed that she stopped doing interviews as her quotes were regularly “manipulated” in order to promote the idea that she was a “diva”.
The pop star told Zane Lowe’s Apple Radio show that she had experienced professional backlash for expressing opinions in the past.
“I stopped doing interviews for a really long time because I felt like whenever I would get into a position where somebody would try to say something for clickbait or twist my words … I would defend myself,” she explained.
“And then, people would be like, ‘Oh, she’s a diva.’ And I was like, ‘This doesn’t make any sense.’”
She continued: “If I have an opinion artistically or if I am directing something, or if I have something to say regarding a choice that’s being made with my career or something … it always was in the past kind of manipulated and turned into this negative thing, whereas I don’t see that with men.
“It’s like when men express their opinions or defend themselves or are directing something and making notes on something, they’re ‘brilliant’ and they’re ‘geniuses’ … It’s just so not the same thing with women, which I hope we can work on fixing.”
Grande, who recently banned Tiger King star Carole Baskin from appearing in a crowd-sourced music video, also used the Lowe interview to praise her ex-boyfriend, the rapper Mac Miller, who died in 2018.
“Nothing mattered more to him than music, ever,” she remembered. “He was a person who gave literally every single second of his thought and time and life to his music.”
