Earlier this week, Brazilian footballer Jorginho Frello called out Chappell Roan on Instagram, alleging that the artist’s security spoke to his wife and 11-year-old daughter “in an extremely aggressive manner” at a São Paulo hotel. Roan has now responded to the allegations in a video posted to her Instagram story.
In his post, shared in both Portuguese and English, Frello said that his family had been staying at the same hotel as Roan ahead of Lollapalooza Brasil, which the singer headlined on Saturday, March 21. According to Frello, after his daughter “walked past the singer’s table, looked to confirm it was her, smiled, and went back to sit with her mum” at breakfast, a security guard approached them and accused them of harassing and disrespecting the artist. Frello said that the individual also threatened to file a complaint with the hotel, and that the incident left his daughter “in tears” and “extremely shaken.”
“I’ve lived with football, public exposure, and well-known people for many years, and I understand very well what respect and boundaries are. What happened there was not that. It was just a child admiring someone,” Frello wrote. “It’s sad to see this kind of treatment coming from those who should understand the importance of fans.” After Frello shared his post, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Cavaliere, said that Roan would not be permitted to perform at the city’s annual Todo Mundo no Rio event while he is in office.
In a video shared today, March 22, Roan shared her side of the story, noting that the security guard in question was not her personal security, and that she never saw a mother and child approach her. “They did not come up to me. They weren’t doing anything,” Roan stated. “It’s unfair for security to just assume someone doesn’t have good intentions when they have no reason to believe [that].” Pitchfork has reached out to Roan’s representatives for comment.
Roan concluded: “I do not hate people who are fans of my music. I do not hate children. Like, that is crazy. I’m sorry to the mother and child that someone was assuming something that you would do something and that if you felt uncomfortable, that makes me really sad. You did not deserve that.”
Several hours later, Catherine Harding, the mother of the daughter at the center of this, recounted her side of the story in a lengthy Instagram video. “Even if [Chappell Roan] did send [the security guard] or she didn’t send him, I don’t know, for me, I feel like it really overstepped a boundary because he is quite intimidating. He is very large,” said Harding. “So for him to come over to a table with just a woman and her daughter eating breakfast to kind of like berate and scold us and say that he was going to complain, and tell me that I should be teaching my daughter to be better and that she’s badly educated and we should respect people’s privacy and we should not harass people and all of these other things… I hope that maybe if it wasn’t her, that she learns to not allow the people that work for her to treat people like this.”
The security guard in question, Pascal Duvier, later took “full responsibility” for the incident but played down the portrayal of his actions. “I made a judgment call based on information we obtained from the hotel, events I had witnessed in the days prior and the heightened overall security risk of our location,” he wrote on Instagram. “My sole interaction with the mother was calm and with good intentions, and the outcome of the encounter is regretful”.