As Manchester gradually works toward recovering from the terrorist attack that took place while Ariana Grande performed at Manchester Arena on May 22nd, it bears recalling that this isn’t the first American woman to experience what can only be mildly put as “a bout of bad luck” whilst abroad. Whether it has to do with merely being at the wrong place at the wrong time or the simple fact that American women tend to represent just the sort of frivolity that most Europeans despise is at one’s discretion. The bottom line is, you don’t often see these types of “freak” occurrences happening to men. Though the below women didn’t suffer quite the same trauma as those present for the Manchester atrocity, what follows are some of the most recent examples of American women who have not fared so well in Europe for one reason or another.
On October 3, 2016, Kim Kardashian West, while in Paris for Fashion Week, endured the now notorious jewelry heist that left her stripped of upwards of $5 million in precious stones, including her Lorraine Schwartz 20-karat ring from Kanye. After being dragged across her hotel room by men disguised in police uniforms, Kardashian West was subsequently bound to her bed with plastic cables and gagged with tape around her mouth.
Strangely around the same time as the Kardashian incident, October 2, Lindsay Lohan’s finger was severed off in a boating accident while she was in Turkey. Her recent commitment to all things Turkish, including her sporting of a headscarf that led her to be “racially profiled” at Heathrow earlier this year, has found her in the country for long stretches of time. Between offering support to Syrian refugees and studying the Quran, Lohan has plenty of reason to stick around. Plus, she has a nightclub right nearby in Athens, called, aptly, LOHAN. While the brief finger loss (it was soon after reattached) may very well be a simple case of bad luck, it’s unlikely this sort of shit would have happened to Lohan in a New York harbor.
Madonna might have, as usual, been the American woman to blaze the trail for unfortunate happenstance at the 2015 Brit Awards when, while performing her then latest single from Rebel Heart, “Living for Love,” the cape she was wearing did not come off as it was supposed to. When yanked away by her dancers, rather than gracefully letting go of Madonna’s neck, it instead continued to latch on, resulting in the fall that launched a thousand ageist Twitter memes. Once again, this is merely a clear case of regrettable coincidence, and yet, has Madonna ever fallen in the U.S.? No.
Fittingly, the timeline of these instances of misfortune reveal a gradual escalation, one leading past mere fortuity and into the very depths of what it means to be abhorred for being an American woman representative of wealth, independence and autonomy. Grande and her fanbase were targeted for celebrating female empowerment–the victims of enjoying only the very thing on which America is founded upon: freedom of expression. The problem is, Europe’s too close to certain geographical locations where this level of freedom, most specifically for women, can’t abide.
