It’s the 11-minute space trip heard round the world — and it just won’t go away.
Weeks on from Katy Perry’s epic girlboss trip to the outer atmosphere, the multi-millionaire pop musician says she’s been “battered and bruised” by the internet’s backlash to her garish stunt.
The all-female space trip — which happened on April 14 via a spacecraft owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos — was widely panned as an ostentatious display of wealth and privilege, a PR stunt wrapped in a faux-feminist veneer, and a damning moment heralding the emptiness and waste of private space travel.
Under a post by a Katy Perry fan page, the fabulously wealthy pop star lavished paragraphs of praise on her ride-or-dies: “I’m so grateful for you guys. We’re in this beautiful and wild journey together.”
“When the ‘online’ world tries to make me a human Piñata,” Perry continues, “I take it with grace and send them love, cause I know so many people are hurting in so many ways and the internet is very much so a dumping ground for unhinged and unhealed.”
She goes on to admit that she’s not perfect, but falls short of addressing the class criticism underlying the bad press that’s plagued her for weeks.
“I’m on a human journey playing the game of life with an audience of many and sometimes I fall but… I get back up and go on and continue to play the game and somehow through my battered and bruised adventure I keep looking to the light and in that light a new level UNLOCKS,” she concluded.
Though Perry claims she’s responded with grace, her actions tell a different story.
The popstar previously gushed that her brief stint in space — which cost millions of dollars — was “about making space for future women and taking up space and belonging,” vastly overlooking the untold millions of working women who will go their whole lives without earning the kind of money Perry makes in a day.
She’s also struggling to sell tickets for her Lifetimes tour, after an insider revealed Perry believed the spaceflight would help ignite fervor equal to Taylor Swift’s record breaking Eras tour.
And Perry definitely didn’t direct her publicist to chastise the Wendy’s social media team as the backlash mounted, after the fast food chain quipped, “can we send her back?”
“Wendy’s should ‘do the right thing’… apologize and do better in the future,” an “anonymous source” seethed to People magazine.
Whether or not the backlash is deserved is certainly a matter of opinion. But whether the “woe is me” treatment will result in more ticket sales is a matter of optics — and Katy Perry’s aren’t looking good.
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