Ariana Grande has broken her silence on the tragic Manchester bombing that took place after her concert Monday night.
“My heart, prayers and deepest condolences are with the victims of the Manchester attack and their loved ones,” she wrote in a statement released on Friday. “There is nothing I or anyone can do to take away the pain you’re feeling or to make this better. However, I extend my hand and heart and everything I possibly can give to you and yours, should you want or need my help in any way. The only thing we can do now is choose how we let this affect us and how we live our lives from here on out.”
“I have been thinking of my fans, and all of you, nonstop over the past week,” she continued. “The way you have handled all of this has been more inspiring and made me more proud than you’ll ever know. They compassion, kindness, love, strength and oneness that you’ve shown one another this past week is exact opposite of the heinous intentions it must take to pull off something as evil as what happened Monday. You are the opposite. I am sorry for the pain and fear that you must be feeling and for the trauma that you, too, must be experiencing.”
“We will never be able to understand why events like this take place because it is not in our nature, which is why we shouldn’t recoil,” she wrote. “We will not quit or operate in fear. We won’t let this divide us. We won’t let hate win. I don’t want to go the rest of the year without be able to see and hold and uplift my fans, the same way they continue to uplift me. Our response to this violence must be to come closer together, to help each other, to love more, to sing louder and to live more kindly and generously than we did before.”
The singer announced that she will be returning to Manchester to pay tribute to all the innocent victims who lost their lives in the tragic attack.
“I’ll be returning to the incredibly brave city of Manchester to spend time with my fans and to have a benefit concert in honor of and to raise money for the victims and their families,” she wrote. “I want to thank my fellow musicians and friends for reaching out to be a part of our expression of love for Manchester. I will have details to share with you as soon as everything is confirmed. From the day we started putting the Dangerous Woman tour together, I said the show, more than anything else, was intended to be a safe space for my fans. A place for them to escape, to celebrate, to heal, to feel safe and to be themselves. To meet their friends they’ve made online. To express themselves. This will not change that. When you look into the audience at my shoes, you see a beautiful, diverse, pure, happy crowd. Thousands of people, incredibly different, all there for the same reason, music.”
“Music is something that everyone on earth and share,” she explained. “Music is my meant to heal us, to bring us together, to make us happy. So that is what you will continue to do for us. We will continue to in honor of the ones we lost, their loved ones, my fans and all affected by this tragedy. They will be on my mind and in my heart every day and I will think of them with everything I do for the rest of my life.”
