Ariana Grande gave her first public worded statement about and to Mac Miller since his fatal overdose on September 7. The pop star had posted a black-and-white photograph in honor of her ex-boyfriend a couple of days after his death, though it didn’t include a caption. She had also disabled Instagram comments after trolls began to publicly and viciously blame her for Miller’s death.
“i adored you from the day i met you when i was nineteen and i always will,” wrote Grande in the caption of a video she’d taken of Miller sitting across from her at a candlelit table. She addresses her disbelief and grief over her ex-boyfriend’s death, and acknowledges the rapper’s struggle with addiction; “we talked about this,” she wrote. “so many times. i’m so mad, i’m so sad i don’t know what to do.”
“you were my dearest friend. for so long. above anything else. i’m so sorry i couldn’t fix or take your pain away,” writes Grande, as though she expected to be able to, despite knowing she couldn’t.
Grande and Miller began dating in 2016 and broke up in May of this year. Under scrutiny for “jumping into” a relationship with SNL‘s Pete Davidson, Grande released a statement in her own defense in which she called her relationship with Miller “toxic.”
“I have cared for him and tried to support his sobriety & prayed for his balance for years (and always will of course),” she wrote. “But shaming/blaming women for a man’s inability to keep his shit together is a very major problem.”