NEW YORK — American singer Bebe Rexha suffered a facial injury Sunday after a fan threw her cell phone at her during a concert in New York. This when considering, supposedly, “that it would be fun,” local media reported on Tuesday.
Videos of the incident collected by the media show how Rexha, 33, was on stage when an object thrown from the audience hit her in the face, causing the artist to fall to her knees with a visible grimace of pain. At that point she had to be escorted out of the event.
Rexha was taken to a hospital and received stitches in one eyebrow, which she later showed in an Instagram post, sporting the purple eyelid but assuring: “I’m fine.”
The fan, Nicolas Malvagna, 27, was arrested and appeared in court on Monday afternoon after being charged with harassment and assault, to which he pleaded not guilty. He was released without bail, but the judge imposed a restraining order on him from the artist.
According to the NBC channel, the accusation document mentions a witness who was at the scene and heard Malvagna say that it had been him, and supposedly justify it like this: “I was trying to see if I could hit her with the phone at the end of the show because it would be fun.
However, the defendant also told the agents who arrested him that he was trying to carry out a challenge for the TikTok social network in which “you throw your phone on stage” and the celebrity “takes a selfie”, but he did not have a good aim, so according to the New York Post.
This was corroborated by his lawyer, Todd Spodek, who described the TikTok challenge as “unfortunate” and stressed that the defendant’s “sole intention” was for Bebe Rexha to “take pictures with her phone”, not to harm her.
Other artists have been victims of their followers who throw objects at them from the public, such as the Spanish Rosalía, who complained last year when she was hit in the face with a bouquet of roses, or the British Harry Styles, who was thrown pills candy in one eye.
