Taylor Swift breaks down in floods of tears in her new documentary as she shares how the horrific terror attack at a Swift-themed dance class impacted her.
In episode one of the Disney+ series The End of an Era, Swift got emotional as she first addressed a thwarted terrorist plot that led her to cancel her three scheduled Eras stops in Vienna in August 2024.
“We dodged a massacre situation,” Swift said, before expressing her fears about resuming the tour in London mere days after the threat.
“I thought that this would be a tour I was very proud of. But this is more than a tour. It’s a force to be reckoned with in global culture. So never in my life did I think we would have a terrorist plot.”
She then goes on to speak openly about the weight she felt at the UK shows following a horrific July 2024 stabbing at a Swift-themed dance party in Southport, during which three young girls were killed and 10 people were injured.
“Basically it’s a weird feeling going into these last five shows in Europe because … we’ve done 128 shows so far,” she says in the 2024 footage, “but this is the first one where I feel like I’m skating on thin ice or something. We just had this series of very violent, scary things happen to the tour. We dodged a massacre situation.
“There was this horrible attack in Liverpool at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. And it was little kids that, uh … ” At this, she trails off, unable to complete the sentence and say that three children died after being assaulted by a knife-wielding attacker.
A message then appears on screen revealing that Swift met with survivors of the Liverpool attack before each of the concerts in London. The film then cuts to Swift sitting alone minutes after spending time with the victims, before she slowly breaks down in tears just moments before she’s due to be onstage.
It’s a moment that mirrors the viral scene from fellow pop star Katy Perry’s documentary where she receives a text from then-husband Russell Brand asking for a divorce before having to swallow her feelings and go onstage moments later.
“It’s gonna be fine, because when I meet them, I’m not gonna do this. I swear to God, I’m not gonna do this,” she vows. “I’m gonna be smiling.”
“Any of this gets out of the way before you ever go upstage. You lock it off for three and a half hours. They don’t have to worry about you. It’s like you’re a pilot flying the plane. And if you were like, ‘Ooh, there’s turbulence up ahead; I don’t know if we’re actually gonna land in Dallas; I’m gonna try hard, but I don’t know if I can actually figure out how to land through this turbulence,’ everyone on the plane’s gonna freak out.”
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