For years, no one really knew what went on behind the scenes at the Met Gala. After everyone walks the carpet, the night carries on without as many cameras. Every now and then, a bathroom selfie will emerge, or a sneak peek at whoever led the surprise performance. But there was more content than usual coming out of the 2025 Met Gala, much to the distress of Sabrina Carpenter‘s father, who would have preferred not to see his pop star daughter being fed a cherry by Usher.
“? Weird,” Carpenter’s father texted her, sharing an image of the playful moment that occurred far beyond the carpet. The singer shared a screenshot of their text exchange in an Instagram photo dump from the night. It also included images of the custom Louis Vuitton bodysuit she wore on the carpet, her afterparty outfit, and shots with Jenna Ortega and Chappell Roan. The screenshot was the final image in the slide — the cherry on top.
“Apologies Mr Carpenter 😅🍒,” Usher commented beneath the post. The musician is used to getting people riled up, playfully or otherwise. In 2023, he serenaded Keke Palmer during his Las Vegas residency, which caused her then-boyfriend to have a public crash-out of epic proportions. Later that year, Usher considered serenading Gabrielle Union, too, but decided it wasn’t worth going head to head with her husband. “Y’know, this is Dwyane Wade — I ain’t crazy,” he said at the time. “That man will knock my whole head off and then dunk it.”
Carpenter has bolstered her pop star brand with playful and flirty encounters of her own, like her retired “Nonsense” outros and the “Juno” and “Bed Chem” positions she replaced them with on tour. “You have to know how to read to understand what she’s saying,” her choreographer Jasmie Badie told Rolling Stone last year. “You have to know what innuendos are. You have to know what synonyms are. You have to know what symbolism is.”
But there’s depth in Carpenter’s work, too. In 2023, she shared her fifth studio album, Emails I Can’t Send, the title track of which addressed a complicated moment in her relationship with her father. “This song reminds me of my childhood,” she told Rolling Stone at the time. “I think anytime you start to process why you are the way you are, maybe because of things that happened in your childhood, it’s always a sad realization to come to. It’s also sad when you grow up and the characters in the storybooks were not who you thought they were.”
When Vogue recently asked Carpenter how she presented the song to her dad, she said: “Sure as hell did not play it for him in person. I sent it to my mother first. There were definitely feelings involved. But you birthed me, so you kind of have to deal with the repercussions.”
