Robert Kraft has confirmed that he barred Macklemore from performing at Gillette Stadium, responding to the rapper's claim that the New England Patriots owner organized his removal from Ed Sheeran's US tour after pro-Palestinian remarks onstage.
Kraft said in a statement that Gillette Stadium has a longstanding commitment to providing a welcoming environment for all guests and to ensuring events at the venue do not provide a platform for hate speech. He said the decision regarding the September 25 and 26 concerts was based on Macklemore's recent actions, material shared from the stage during the New Jersey shows, and what he described as a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community.
He added that the decision was not about diminishing the suffering of innocent Palestinians or denying anyone the right to advocate for them, saying their pain and loss are real, but that such advocacy should not come at the expense of the Jewish community or obscure the responsibility of Hamas. He said he would welcome the opportunity to sit down with Macklemore and discuss the facts.
Kraft confirmed his own decision about his own venue. He did not address Macklemore's larger allegation.
That allegation, made in a lengthy Instagram post on Monday, was that Sheeran told him Kraft had rallied other stadium owners and that together they presented the singer with an ultimatum: keep Macklemore on the tour and the venues would be closed to it. A representative for Kraft did not immediately respond to a request for comment on that specific claim.
The promoter's account is narrower. Messina Touring Group said it had been notified by venues on the remaining US dates that they would not allow a concert to take place with Macklemore on the lineup, that this would have meant cancelling the tour and affecting hundreds of thousands of fans, and that after discussions with stakeholders he would not perform the remaining support dates.
Macklemore's post also described his conversations with Sheeran. He called the singer a friend, said Sheeran was in a difficult position, and said Sheeran told him the words "Free Palestine" and the image of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to many people he had spoken with. Macklemore wrote that he replied that if those words were more offensive than the deaths of Palestinian children, there was a fundamental disconnect between them, and that Sheeran could not move past his public position of not taking sides. He said the dispute has strained a thirteen-year friendship.
Sheeran has said nothing. He did not respond when the Israeli-American Council circulated a petition on September 6 calling for the rapper's removal, and he has not commented since the removal was announced. Requests for comment from Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety and NME have gone unanswered. Kraft, by contrast, praised Sheeran in his statement.
The episode began at MetLife Stadium on September 4, where Macklemore told the crowd he had joined the tour so he could say two words in stadiums across America, and that he wanted people from Gaza to the West Bank to know they had not been forgotten. He named Cuba, Congo, Sudan and Iran alongside Palestine, and criticized US immigration enforcement, before performing "Hind's Hall" with footage from Gaza and campus protests on the stadium screens. He also addressed Jewish listeners directly, saying that criticism of Israel was not criticism of them and that his message was for peace and for all people to be treated with dignity and equality.
Responding to his removal, Macklemore wrote that antisemitism is real and that this is precisely why the term should not be used as a shield against criticism of the Israeli state.
Pink, who reposted a StopAntisemitism post describing the set as anti-Israel propaganda and saying Jewish fans were owed apologies, addressed the resulting backlash on Friday. She wrote that she had been quiet for a week, that the post she shared used words she would not have chosen, and that she had responded to criticism with memes rather than saying what she meant.
Of the four public figures now entangled in this, three have spoken at length. The one whose tour it is has not.
