Ariana Grande slams tabloids and TikTok in new interview

“Yes, And?” songstress Ariana Grande doesn’t mince words in her new interview on “The Zack Sang Show” with radio host and Zach Sang . Promoting her upcoming album “Eternal Sunshine” which drops March 8, she also had some choice words for the tabloids and TikTok. 

In part one of the two-part interview, she spoke about her music, including a demo called “Fantasize,” which was leaked in 2023 and subsequently went viral on TikTok. Ariana managed to laugh it off during the interview, saying “Thank you so much. I’ll see you in jail. Literally.”

But then the “Thank U Next” singer revealed that the leaked version was a demo made for a TV show, “It was like a parody of this girl group vibe. But [the fans] love it… It’s so corny, but it’s okay. I took the note and I kind of gave them Ariana’s version of that on the album. ”

“They’re completely different now. So although you’ve heard them, because you stole them, they’re very different now.”

But it wasn’t just TikTok that saw the brunt of her wrath: she also took aim at the tabloids for running with a narrative about her personal life that she characterized as sexist.

Without getting into details about her personal life, she said in the interview, “We know this about the tabloids and about the media. We selectively remember that this is what the tabloids do to people, especially women, based on whether or not we like the person. We selectively leave space for humanness, for nuance."

She continued, "They don't leave space for that, well they do for their friends and their family, it's selective. They turn it off when that aligns with a version of a person that they have in their head that they want to believe is true."

"We don’t need to go into any specifics, but of course there’s an insatiable frustration, inexplicable, hellish feeling with watching people misunderstand the people you love and you and anything," she said, seemingly alluding to her current main squeeze at “Wicked” co-star Ethan Slater.

In 2023, Ariana Grande filed for divorce from her husband Dalton Gomez after two years of marriage and started dating Ethan Slater. Despite Page Six confirming that Ariana and Ethan only started dating when they were both single, there was rampant speculation of cheating on both sides, with Ethan also being married when they first met.

Ariana later alluded to the backlash in an Instagram story in which she said: "I have never felt [...] so deeply misunderstood by people who don't know me, who piece whispers together, make what they want out of me and their assumptions of my life." 

Speaking with Zach Sang, she now confirms that her album will address people's perceptions of her as well as her real life. She said: "I'm so nervous because pieces of it touch on things that are real and then pieces of it are also part of the concept."

"It's so scary to leave it up to these selective memory people to decipher."

Her interview also touched on her inspiration for the “Eternal Sunshine” concept for the album, and her time as Glinda in Wicked. You can watch part one of the interview below.