Taylor Swift has emotionally addressed the tragic stabbing incident in Southport, UK, where three young fans lost their lives.
The attack, which occurred in 2024, involved 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana entering a dance studio in Southport that was hosting a Taylor Swift themed dance party.
Rudakubana began a violent attack with a knife, targeting the 26 children present at the event.
Among those killed in the incident were Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, with 10 others sustaining injuries.
Now 18, Rudakubana received a life sentence for the murders, with a minimum term of 52 years before he can be considered for parole – an exceptionally severe sentence in the UK.
Following the tragedy, Swift has addressed the situation in a new documentary released by Disney, expressing her intent to meet the families of the victims.
Speaking tearfully at a London hotel, she said: “I am going to meet some of these families tonight and put on a pop concert, you know.
“I’m going to meet some of these families tonight.
“It’s going to be fine as I am not going to be doing this. I am going to be smiling so any of this gets out of the way before you go on stage.”
She continued: “We are in London at my hotel and basically it is a weird feeling going into these last five shows in Europe because it sort of feels like, we’ve done 128 shows so far but this is the first one where I feel like, I am skating on thin ice or something.
“We have had a series of very violent and scary things happen to the tour like we dodged a massacre situation. I have been all over the place.
“There was this horrible attack in Liverpool at a Taylor Swift dance party and it was little kids that….”
Discussing how she manages to perform following such an event, Swift said: “You lock it off. Three and a half hours they don’t have to worry about you. It’s like you are a pilot flying the plane.
“If you were like ‘oh there is turbulence up ahead I don’t know if we are going to land in Dallas, I am going to try hard but I don’t know if we are going to figure out’, everyone on the plane is going to freak out.
“You just have to have a calm cool collected tone of ‘we will be landing some turbulence ahead but nothing we haven’t dealt with before so keep your seatbelts fastened and welcome to the eras tour’.”