Katy Perry is getting some warmth for a joke she made at an aspiring singer’s expense on American Idol.
When the 38-year-old pop star and her Idol co-judges Lionel Richie and Luke Bryan found on the March 5 episode {that a} hopeful named Sara Beth Liebe was the mom of three youngsters at simply 25, she stood up and clutched the desk in entrance of her, leaning again on it in shock.
“If Katy lays on the desk, I feel I’m going to cross out,” Liebe exclaimed, to which Perry quipped, “Honey, you’ve been laying on the desk an excessive amount of.”
The younger mom has since known as out Perry’s joke, saying in a latest TikTok that it was “embarrassing to have that on TV.” “It was hurtful and that’s that,” she continued. “I feel that girls supporting and uplifting different girls is so cool, and I feel that mother shaming is tremendous lame and I feel that it’s arduous sufficient to be a mother and it’s arduous sufficient to be a girl.”
“I see the entire younger mothers and simply mothers generally … maintain loving your infants,” Liebe added. “No one deserves to really feel crappy about that.”
Billboard has reached out to Perry for remark.
After performing renditions of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” and Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets,” Liebe went on to obtain a golden ticket from the judges — however solely after enduring additional criticism from Perry. The “Darkish Horse” singer expressed doubt that the hopeful, who was effervescent with nervous power, was bold sufficient for the present. At one other level, she mentioned the singer was “like a comic book strip character got here to life.”
Viewers additionally weren’t pleased with the opposite judges’ reactions to Liebe — Bryan laughed heartily together with Perry’s desk joke and Richie was the one choose who voted towards passing the singer on to the subsequent spherical — although most expressed explicit disappointment in Perry’s remarks.
“The judges appeared to exit of their solution to choose her earlier than they’d something to really choose,” commented one on the audition video posted to Idol‘s YouTube channel. “After she sang her pure coronary heart out, the judges acted like they wanted to avoid wasting face and keep impolite in direction of her as a substitute of acknowledging they could have jumped the gun forming an opinion too rapidly…. Disgrace on Katy particularly.”
“I like that she powered by way of all of the rudeness,” wrote one other, calling Liebe “a ray of sunshine.”
Watch her American Idol audition above.
