Kesha's Mom Explains Jeffrey Dahmer Reference In 'Cannibal' Lyrics Amid Backlash

Kesha's mother, Pebe Sebert, has addressed the controversial line from her daughter's song "Cannibal," which nonchalantly mentions notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Kesha drew the ire of netizens and families of Dahmer's victims recently for name-dropping the serial killer, whose gruesome crimes are exposed in the hit Netflix series "Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story."

In a TikTok video posted Sunday, Sebert explained how the name of Dahmer made it to Kesha's 2010 hit song. Kesha and her co-writer were still "too young to even know who Jeffrey Dahmer was" when they wrote the song, which includes the line, "Be too sweet and you'll be a goner, yeah, I'll pull a Jeffrey Dahmer."

"Some context on the lyric that's bothering people 12 years later. All opinions are valid. Not meant to shut anyone down, just more info," she captioned her post.

Sebert started the video acknowledging that the Dahmer lyric in the song "is a big controversy right now." "I thought I'd just say a few things about it because that was my line that I wrote in 'Cannibal,'" she said.

"Literally, the way it happened is I have this rhyming program called Master Writer for Songwriters. We were looking for a rhyme for 'goner,' at the very end of the widest rhymes was Jeffrey Dahmer. I was like, 'Oh, my God, that's a perfect lyric,'" the mother added.

Sebert said they did not mean to be insensitive to any of the families of Dahmer's victims, saying "Cannibal" was initially meant to be a "tongue-in-cheek funny song" about Kesha and not literally about cannibalism. "It was just a title," she explained.

Sebert went on to apologize to the people involved in the tragedy committed by Dahmer, saying the song had been released long before the Netflix series about Dahmer trended worldwide last month.

"We certainly never meant to hurt anybody or make anybody feel bad. There's a series out right now that's kind of bringing attention back. The song's been out for more than 10 years, probably almost 12 years. This is not something that we've recently written," Sebert said. She also acknowledged that Dahmer's crimes were "extreme" and "worse than anyone had ever done that anybody knew about."