14 DAY TRIAL // Ariana Grande got herself into some trouble last week, when footage emerged of her and her posse in a California donut shop, with Ariana and her backup dancer boyfriend daring each other to lick the donuts on display. She will not be facing criminal charges for what she did.
If you’re new to the Ariana Grande DonutGate, you have some catching up to do, but the videos below and her apologies should come in handy. Shortly after the surveillance footage emerged online, the Lake Elsinore Police Department and the Riverside County Department of Public Health launched separate investigations to determine is the pop star was to be held accountable for her actions.
Ariana is off the hook
She won’t be, People Magazine reports. The investigations have now concluded and the owner of Wolfee Donuts, the shop in question, has decided not to press charges.
That means that Ariana is off the hook and won’t be facing criminal charges. The only party to receive a slap on the wrist was actually the donut shop, which got a B grade from the health department for not keeping its items behind the glass and out of customers’ reach, as stipulated by California law.
The owner, Joe Marin, tells the same celebrity publication that there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for that.
“We got a B because the donuts were on top of the tray, and we were actually stocking up. My employees kept going in the back and grabbing some more… They were minor things: little, tiny, minor things that were fixed in three days,” he says.
He’s confident that the shop will get its initial A grade back on tomorrow’s check-up.
Ariana exposed as a nasty diva
Perhaps more important than the criminal charges (or lack thereof) is the fact that Ariana’s image took a serious hit in this debacle. First off, she put her tongue (and allegedly spit, too) on donuts she knew she wouldn’t buy but that other people would pay for and eat.
She did it on a dare and then claimed she was “young” and, as such, was prone to make mistakes. Ariana Grande is a 22-year-old woman who still doesn’t know spitting or licking other people’s food isn’t just very nasty but also very, very rude.
Secondly, on the original surveillance video, she was heard saying “I hate America. I hate Americans” when presented with a tray of oversize pastries. She later tried to talk her way out of the mess by saying she’d gotten frustrated, “as a health advocate,” at the sight of the kind of junk Americans call food and put in their bodies.
However, she was buying the same junk she claimed to have enraged her. A second video, which popped up online the other day, showed her ordering the donuts and then eating one on her way out.
In her initial apology, she tried to argue that her friends had ordered. Apparently, she was too health-conscious to touch that junk.
need to clean up this mouth of mine & set a better example for my babes. i apologize and i love you. always learning. pic.twitter.com/BkJWcLxR5y
— Ariana Grande (@ArianaGrande) July 8, 2015