"I was just like, 'What? Why?'"
Camila Cabello has finally spoken out about that Fifth Harmony VMAs moment.
The “Havana” singer left the girl group in December 2016 after her contract with the group expired, according to a Billboard report.
“After 4 and a half years of being together, we have been informed via her representatives that Camila has decided to leave Fifth Harmony,” said a statement posted to the group’s Twitter page, signed by all four remaining members. “We wish her well.”
— Fifth Harmony (@FifthHarmony) December 19, 2016
The statement continued, “We are excited for the future and can’t wait for what the new year brings.” But it turns out, the new year brought a whole lot of shade.
During the group’s VMA performance, held eight months after the split, a mysterious fifth person was standing alongside the group before “falling” backward off the stage.
Cabello remained silent about the incident for months, but finally commented in an interview with The New York Times.
“It definitely hurt my feelings,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting it, I wasn’t prepared for it — especially because at that point I’d moved on from it. I was just like, ‘What? Why?'”
She continued, “I don’t like holding onto the past, especially when it’s stuff that, in my opinion, is just petty.”
But the girl group hasn’t confirmed the mysterious ejected fifth singer was supposed to be Cabello. “We get asked all the time if we’re getting a fifth member,” Fifth Harmony member Ally Brooke said on Good Morning America. “And we wanted to show the world in an artistic way that, hey, the four of us are Fifth Harmony.”
Cabello released her debut solo album Camila earlier this month. Her single “Havana” holds the record for the longest reigning single from a female artist to be number 1 on Billboard‘s Mainstream Top 40 chart, surpassing Taylor Swift’s 2013 hit, “I Knew You Were Trouble.” She’s obviously doing fine without her four harmonizers.