Chappell Roan Says Fans Are ‘Scared’ to Approach Her After She Spoke Out Against Predatory Behavior

Last summer, Chappell Roan made headlines for loudly calling out predatory fan behavior through a series of social media posts. Months later, she says her interactions in public have drastically changed, with the “Hot to Go!” artist theorizing on Call Her Daddy that listeners are now too afraid to approach her.

“I think people are scared of me,” Roan told host Alex Cooper on the podcast posted Wednesday (March 26). “I think I made a big enough deal about not talking to me that people do not talk to me.”

“I’ve been with people, like, friends who are artists, and when they’re with me, they’re like, ‘It’s a force field around us. People don’t come up to me if I’m with you,'” the Missouri native continued. “I’m just like, ‘Damn, baby. You say it too. You say, ‘Don’t touch me, don’t touch me. Don’t look at me, don’t touch me. I don’t know who you are.’ And they won’t come up and bother you.”

The interview comes about seven months after Roan sparked widespread discourse about how society treats celebrities in public, with the Grammy winner at the time emphasizing how scary it can be to have people touch her without consent, harass her family members or track her whereabouts. “Women don’t owe you s–t,” she wrote in an August note on Instagram. “I chose this career path because because I love music and art and honoring my inner child, I do not accept harassment of any kind because I chose this path, nor do I deserve it.”

On Call Her Daddy, Roan clarified that just because she felt the need to set boundaries with fans, doesn’t mean she enjoyed doing it. “It hurts that I have to … I know it really hurts people,” she said. “They feel like it’s me disrespecting them, that I owe it to them and that, how dare I call it abuse or complain about success. I get that a lot, but I’m not complaining about success. I’m just complaining about creepy behavior. I love admiration — everyone loves admiration. I just don’t want you to interrupt me when I’m having a fight with my girlfriend. Don’t be like, ‘Can I get a photo?’ when I’m crying, talking to my girlfriend. That’s f–king crazy.”

The reason Roan felt compelled to call out fans in the first place was due in part to how quickly she became a household name within the span of just a few months in 2024, thanks to the runaway success of her Billboard Hot 100 hit “Good Luck, Babe!,” summer festival appearances and album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. “It happened literally overnight,” Roan recalled to Cooper.

As her fame levels multiplied, so did the amount of creepy experiences with fans, a metamorphosis that Roan compared to a “second puberty.” “It’s like everything is gonna change, and everything is gonna hurt and everything is gonna be uncomfortable now,” she said. “Katy Perry was so straight up … When she came up to me at [Charli XCX and Troye Sivan’s] Sweat Tour, she’s like, ‘Just don’t read the comments, honey. Bye bye.’ She just, like, hopped off, and I was, like, actually cackling. Like, why am I doing this to myself?”

“You don’t realize how many people are watching you, and you don’t realize they are,” Roan added. “Some people want me dead. It’s crazy. People know everything about me. People know my flight numbers. People know everything.”

Listen to Roan on Call Her Daddy below.