As you’ve likely heard by now, rapper Mac Miller passed away on Friday after suffering what appeared to be an accidental drug overdose in his San Fernando Valley home.
Though he was an accomplished artist in his own right, Miller was likely best known in the mainstream for his two and a half year relationship with pop icon Ariana Grande.
Though Grande and Miller were reportedly not on speaking terms at the time of his death, sources close to the singer have revealed that Ariana was “shattered” by her ex’s untimely passing at the age of 26.
It wasn’t long after the rapper’s death that Grande paid tribute to Miller on Instagram.
But it seems she didn’t find out about her ex’s passing at the same time as the rest of the world.
Within minutes of TMZ reporting the news of Miller’s death, the story was picked up by media outlets over the world.
However, Grande was intentionally kept in the dark by her own staff.
How is such a thing possible in the smartphone era?
Well, it seems Ariana was busy promoting her acclaimed new album, Sweetener, and some of the people she trusts most made the conscious decision to keep Miller’s death under wraps so that she could focus on the task at hand.
At the time of Mac’s passing, Ariana was filming an interview for a BBC documentary about the making of Sweetener.
According to Radar Online, staff made the call to wait until filming was done for the day to tell her about Miller.
A source tells the site that they quickly regretted that decision as Grande “was understandably raging when she found out the news had been kept from her and gave everyone a dressing down when she’d finished crying.”
The insider goes on to describe a nightmarish scene right out of Black Mirror.
It seems that news quickly spread throughout the audience and the rest of the closed set, but Ari remained in the dark for hours:
“There was only a select number of fans allowed in for the filming of the BBC special, and a handful of TV bosses and publicists,” says the insider.
“Even though fans were told to turn off their phones for filming, many kept them on during the interview and knew about the news but none of them could interrupt to tell Ariana,” the sourcr adds.
“The people involved in the show also knew, but chose to let the cameras keep rolling as they didn’t want to disrupt a very expensive set-up since they knew Ariana would probably not want to carry on if she’d been told.”
Sadly, shortly after news of Miller’s death went public, Ariana was forced to disable comments on her Instagram page due to hateful trolls implicating her in ex-boyfriend’s passing.