Phoebe Bridgers Has Had It With Stans 'Fucking Bullying' Her
Celebrity

Phoebe Bridgers Has Had It With Stans 'Fucking Bullying' Her

Phoebe Bridgers is not afraid to call out her own fans when they are being toxic, even going so far as to say she wants to "normalize talking shit about fans" in an interview with Rolling Stone earlier this year. Now the musician is firing back at so-called fans that decided to bully her over a picture of her with Bo Burnham while she was headed to her father's funeral.

Speaking with them alongside her boygenius bandmates on the eve of their highly anticipated new album The Record, Bridgers addressed the harassment she received from online stans after being seen with the comedian at LAX amid rumors that she had split from longtime boyfriend Paul Mescal. “I’m coming from a place of literally — I’m feeling it in my body as I’m saying it, but — people with my picture as their Twitter picture, who claim to like my music, fucking bullied me at the airport on the way to my father’s funeral this year," Bridgers told the publication.

She went out to point the blatant insensitivity of those attacking her over the photo, "It’s not like they didn’t know my dad just died. A lot of the top comments [were] like, ‘Hey, her dad just died, what are you guys doing?’ I fucking hate you, and I hope you grow the fuck up.”

The musician did acknowledge that the harassment was symptomatic of a much broader issue with the parasocial nature of stan culture in general. “If you’re a kid and the internet somehow taught you that that’s an OK thing to do," Bridgers said, "then of course I hate capitalism and everything that led you to believe that it’s okay to do that. I, at one of the lowest points of my life, saw people who claim to love me fucking dehumanize me and shame me and fucking bully me on the way to my dad’s wake."

Bridgers did concede that one of the positive things to come out of the whole ordeal was the support she had from her boygenius bandmates, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus. “My two best friends are helping me with the boundary of I don’t have to sit here and be fucking grateful that that happened and that that’s a part of my job,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be, and it wasn’t five years ago, so I appreciate being able to look at two other people and be like, this is dehumanizing abuse, horrible shit.”

Photo via Getty/ Matt Winkelmeyer