Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift’s Backup Singer Was Diagnosed With Breast Cancer While on the Road For the Eras Tour
Taylor Swift’s backup singer Jeslyn Gorman was diagnosed with breast cancer during the Eras Tour.
Gorman’s diagnosis — which rattled Swift and the rest of the tour family when she shared the news — was discussed in the third episode of Disney+’s docuseries The End of an Era.
“Most of the people I’m out here on the road with have known me since high school. But also there are people that I just got to know in this phase of my life,” Swift, 36, explained. “Jeslyn is one of the most talented, resilient, loving people I’ve ever been around. She was the newest addition to our backup singers.”
“When Jeslyn got sick, it was the first blow that the tour family experienced emotionally,” she continued. “It was, like, completely unfathomable to us.”
Despite her diagnosis, Gorman — who first toured with the “Life of a Showgirl” artist during her 2018 Reputation Tour — didn’t miss a beat.
“Every weekend we had a show,” she explained. “So I still flew to the next city, did a show with everyone, and in the middle of the week when we weren’t doing shows, I would fly back to LA and just had biopsies and just poked and prodded to learn really what I had to do, treatment-wise and then hopped back on stage and pretended like nothing was happening.”
After receiving an official diagnosis, she informed the Grammy winner, who admitted she was “in shambles.”
“‘You just take care of you, and we’ll be here when you’re ready,’” Gorman recalled Swift’s mother, Andrea Swift, telling her.
The backup singer ultimately took six months off from touring to undergo surgery and chemotherapy.
“I usually have all this curly hair. I lost about 75 percent of my hair. I felt and looked completely different, and just kind of watched my friends on live streams of the show,” she recalled.
“We just wanted her to know that no matter what, under any circumstances, if she wanted to come back, she could,” Swift said.
Gorman returned for the last leg of the Eras tour, beginning with Miami in October 2024.
