Taylor Swift broke down while meeting the survivors and families of the three children who died during the Southport stabbing attacks.
In the first episode of her Disney+ docuseries, “The End of an Era,” the singer could be seen walking into a secluded room with her mom, Andrea Swift, after leaving the meet-up.
Taylor immediately sat down, sobbed and looked to the matriarch for comfort.
“I know you helped them. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but you helped them,” Andrea told her while handing her a tissue to wipe her tears.
However, Taylor was inconsolable as she cried into her hands while her mom pulled her in for a hug.
“From a mental standpoint, I just live in a reality that is very unreal a lot of the time, but it’s my job to kinda be able to handle all these feelings and then perk up immediately to perform,” she reflected.
“That’s just the way it’s got to be.”
Earlier in the episode, the “Opalite” songstress also cried while “having a hard time explaining” the aftermath of the attacks ahead of her first London stop in Wembley Stadium.
“But this was the first [show] I feel like – I don’t know – I’m skating on thin ice or something. We’ve had a series of violent, scary things happen to the tour,” she continued, referencing the July stabbings, plus the thwarted Vienna terrorist plot that led her to cancel three concerts.
“Like we dodged a massacre situation and so I’ve just been kind of all over the place. There was this horrible attack in Liverpool at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party and it was little kids that …” she began to explain before breaking down into tears and taking a break from filming the interview.
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Taylor, 35, also assured that she would have a better handle on her emotions when she got to meet the families, saying, “I’m going to be fine because when I meet them, I’m not going to [cry], I swear to God. I’m not going to be doing this; I’m going to be smiling so any of this gets out of the way before you ever go on stage.”
She then compared her having to control her emotions to a pilot flying a plane.
“If you were, ‘Oh there’s turbulence up ahead, I don’t know if we’re going to land in Dallas like I’m going to try hard but I don’t know if I can figure out how to land through this turbulence,’” Swift explained. “Like everyone on the plane is going to freak out. You just have to have a calm, cool, collected tone.”
In another scene from the episode, the “Lover” singer tried to self-soothe with an audiobook before confessing to her mom, “I’m trying to calm down, I’m having a very physical reaction to my nerves.”
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She explained that her “hands [were] shaky,” she was “twitchy” and “fidgety to get the show over” and “get back on the horse.”
She also reflected on the new challenges she will have to face after the European leg of the Eras Tour.
“From a mental standpoint, being afraid something’s going to happen to your fans at any moment. This is a new challenge,” she admitted.
“I want to keep all the nerves I have away from the crowd because when you’re sort of the ringleader of this show, they can sense any kind of shift energetically in you and you have to really focus and factor that in – you’re at the Eras Tour and nothing is wrong!”
In late July 2024, three little girls died and 10 people were injured after a 17-year-old man stormed a Taylor Swift-themed class in Southport.
The singer, who personally reached out to those affected, admitted in a social media post that she was “completely in shock” and “at a complete loss for how to ever convey [her] sympathies to these families.”
A week after the stabbings, two people were arrested in Vienna for planning an attack on one of her concerts in the Austrian city. Taylor was forced to cancel all three concerts in Vienna due to safety concerns.
Swift also addressed the foiled terror plot weeks later, telling Swifties that the whole thing was “devastating.”
