Pink Explains Macklemore Repost Backlash: 'It's Lonelier Than That'

Pink broke a week of silence on Friday with a 1,088-word statement addressing the backlash that followed her repost of criticism aimed at Macklemore's pro-Palestine remarks during his opening set on Ed Sheeran's tour. "I'm standing up for my own people, and I thought I knew going in how lonely that would be. And it's lonelier than that," she wrote, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The controversy traces to Macklemore's September 4 and 5 performances at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

Onstage, the rapper called for a "Free Palestine," said he wanted people in Gaza and the West Bank to know "we have not forgotten them," and told Jewish listeners that criticism of Israel was not criticism of them. Pink responded by resharing a StopAntisemitism post that described Macklemore's set as "anti-Israel propaganda" and demanded apologies and refunds for ticketholders. In her Friday statement, she acknowledged the limits of that act.

"Last Sunday I reposted somebody else's post about Macklemore's set at Ed Sheeran's show," she wrote. "It said things in words I didn't write, and I wouldn't have chosen all of them." Pink said the repost was not about suppressing Macklemore's right to express support for Palestine.

"I have never asked for another artist to be silenced and I'm not asking now," she wrote. "What I need is to be able to say, as a Jewish mom, 'that scared me, and it scared people I love,' without being told our fear is just propaganda, and without being told I'm somehow cool with genocide because I noticed?" She also referenced Macklemore's 2014 Grammy performance of "Same Love" and a costume he wore months later that was widely criticized as a Jewish caricature.

"Every Jew I know knew exactly what it was," Pink wrote. "But he apologized, and I let it go, because that's what we do. We let it go." She said last weekend's performance, with war imagery on the screens and a song dedicated to a movement, changed that calculus.

Macklemore has defended his remarks, writing on social media that "wanting all humans to be treated equal should never be controversial." Ed Sheeran has not publicly commented on the controversy.