“Don’t throw things, you know?” Kelsea Ballerini’s plaintive request during a recent concert shouldn’t be that hard to follow.
In the latest bout of singers being pelted by concert fans, the country star was hit in the face by a bracelet thrown by someone in the audience at her Wednesday night show in Boise, Idaho.
The musician was struck while performing her song “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too),” a video posted on Twitter showed. Ballerini held her face as she stepped away from the microphone before asking her violinist to assess the damage. She briefly began to strum her guitar again before hastily exiting the stage.
The “This Feeling” artist later returned to the stage to finish her set and deliver a message to the audience:
“Can we just talk about what happened?” Ballerini said in a fan video posted on TikTok. “All I care about is keeping everyone safe. If you ever don’t feel safe, please let someone around you know. If anyone’s pushing too much or you just have that gut feeling, just always flag it.”
She ended her speech by simply stating the obvious, “Don’t throw things, you know?”
Ballerini further talked about the incident on her Instagram Stories on Thursday morning.
“Hi. I’m fine. Someone threw a bracelet, it hit me in the eye, and it more so just scared me than hurt me,” she wrote alongside a photo of her performance. “We all have triggers and layers of fears way deeper than what is shown, and that’s why I walked offstage to calm down and make sure myself, band and crew and the crowd all felt safe to continue. That’s all I ever want, is for shows to feel like a safe place for all of us.”
Ballerini’s experience is the latest in an unsettling trend of inappropriate fan behavior at concerts.
Last weekend, a fan gave her mother’s ashes to singer Pink during a performance in London.
The Grammy winner noticed a plastic bag filled with a gray powder during her performance of “Just Like a Pill” on Sunday. After inspecting the container, she asked the fan, “Is this your mom?” and the crowd member seemingly confirmed it was.
“I don’t know how to feel about this,” the 43-year-old musician told the “gift” giver while nervously giggling and handling the cremains.
Earlier this month, pop star Bebe Rexha was injured during a performance in New York when a fan hurled his phone, which struck her in the face. Rexha was transported to a hospital in stable condition and received stitches above her bruised left eyebrow.
A 27-year-old New Jersey man, identified as Nicolas Malvagna, was arrested and charged with assault in connection with the incident, the New York Police Department confirmed to The Times.
“I was trying to see if I could hit her with the phone at the end of the show because it would be funny,” Malvagna said, according to the criminal complaint.
Last week, singer-songwriter Ava Max was slapped by an attendee onstage during her L.A. show.
“He slapped me so hard that he scratched the inside of my eye,” the “Sweet but Psyscho” artist tweeted. “He’s never coming to a show again thank you to the fans for being spectacular tonight in LA though!!”
