Taylor Swift breaks down in tears as she addresses Southport killings publicly for first time

Taylor Swift has publicly addressed the Southport attack for the first time.

The singer broke down in tears in a clip from her documentary of the Eras Tour on Disney+, having met with the survivors and families of the victims before her shows at Wembley Stadium.

In July 2024, Axel Rudakubana killed three young girls - Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine -and injured ten people in a horrific knife attack on a Swift-themed dance class in the Merseyside town.

He was sentenced to a minimum of 52 years for the ‘sadistic’ murders, leaving the country shaken by the acts of ‘pure evil’.

During the doc, Swift describes it as a ‘horrible attack’ and was shown crying, as it’s revealed she met with the survivors and family before each run of five shows in London.

Three young girls were killed in a brutal attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport (PETER POWELL/AFP via Getty Images)

Speaking before doing the ‘pop concert’, the singer says in tears before a meeting: “It’s going to be fine, because when I meet them, I’m not going to do this, I swear to God, I’m not going to do this.

“I’m going to be smiling, so any of this gets out of the way before you ever go on stage, you lock it off three-and-a-half hours, they don’t have to worry about you.

“It’s like you’re like a pilot flying the plane, and if you were like, ‘oh, there’s turbulence at the head, I don’t know if we’re actually going to land in Dallas’.

“Like, I’m going to try hard, but I don’t know if I can actually, like, figure out how to land through this turbulence, like everyone on the plane is going to freak out.”

Swift broke down after meeting with families (Disney+)

And afterwards, she was comforted by her mum, Andrea, who tells her: “I know you helped them, I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I know you helped them.”

During a voiceover, Swift adds: “From a mental standpoint, I just do live in a reality that’s very unreal a lot of the time.

"But it’s my job to kind of be able to handle all these feelings and then perk up immediately to perform. That’s just the way it’s got to be.”

Following her emotional conversations, she is shown being taken to and performing her three-and-a-half hour show at Wembley Stadium.

She described having to 'lock off' her emotions during the shows (Disney+)

Also, during the End Of An Era doc, Swift addresses the failed terror plot at one of her concerts in Vienna, Austria, in August 2024, which saw her gigs called off.

She says: “We just had this, we’ve had a series of very violent, scary things happen to the tour.

“Like we dodged, like a massacre situation, and so I’ve just been kind of all over the place, like there was this horrible attack in Liverpool at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party, and it was little kids that…”

Swift then became emotional and was unable to carry on talking.