Katy Perry says she feels like a “human piñata” due to the amount of mockery and abuse she has received following her trip to space aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin craft.
In an emotional message penned underneath an Instagram fan page, the 40-year-old singer lashed out at the internet as a “dumping ground for the unhinged and unhealed” and thanked her fans for having her back.
“I can continue to remain true to myself, heart open and honest, especially because of our bond,” said Perry.
“Please know I am OK, I have done a lot [of] work around knowing who I am, what is real and what is important to me. My therapist said something years ago that has been a gamechanger, ‘no one can make you believe something about yourself that you don’t already believe about yourself’ and if I ever do have any feelings about it then it’s an opportunity to investigate the feeling underneath it.
“When the ‘online’ world tries to make me a human piñata, 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 a dumping ground for unhinged and unhealed,” she added.
“I’m not perfect, and I actually have omitted that word from my vocabulary, 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.”
Perry found herself at the center of a social media firestorm following her 11 minute space flight, with the singer acting as the focal point for a number of jibes about the all-female crew, which also included news anchor Gayle King and Jeff Bezos’ fiancee Lauren Sanchez.
Celebrities such as Joe Rogan, Emily Ratajkowski and Olivia Munn mocked the spectacle, with the latter saying: “There are so many other things that are so important in the world right now.”
Fellow singer Lily Allen also criticized Perry for her space flight but later retracted the remarks, saying that although she disagreed with the stunt there was no need to “join in the pile-on.”
“There was actually no need for me to bring her name into it, and it was my own internalized misogyny,” Allen said on her podcast earlier this week. “It was just completely unnecessary to pile on with her. I mean, I disagree with what it was that they did, but she wasn’t the only person that did it.”
But criticism of Perry has continued to endure even after the Blue Origin incident, with clips from her ongoing Lifetimes tour circulating online and attracting mockery for the choreography and dancing.
Perry’s last album, 143, was also widely considered to be a flop, spending just a week on the charts and peaking at No.6. The accompanying single, Woman’s World, also performed poorly and was mocked for what was perceived to be an out-of-touch video and subject matter.
