Taylor Swift has sung about the messy side of fame, but nothing lands harder than the first episode of her new Disney+ documentary, The End of an Era. This time, her tears came from a scenario where someone planned to massacre her fans at a concert.
The 14-time Grammy winner starts the episode by admitting she felt like she was “skating on thin ice” during the European part of her Eras Tour. In August 2024, her team scrapped all her Vienna shows after officials confirmed ISIS was planning an attack at her concerts in Ernst Happel Stadium. In the series, she talks about having to push through the first five shows after that.
She said, “We dodged a mass slaughter.”
CIA deputy director David S. Cohen said the attackers were planning to kill “tens of thousands of people.” Authorities arrested two suspects, including a 19-year-old who was supposedly the mastermind. In another case, a 16-year-old Syrian kid named Mohammad A. from Germany was convicted in 2025 for helping a terrorist group overseas. He got an 18-month suspended sentence, which freaked out Taylor Swift fans who were going to go to those Vienna shows.
Taylor Swift sheds tears while discussing the thwarted Eras Tour terror attack in new footage from 2024:
“Never in my life did I think we would have a terrorist plot… it’s a weird feeling going into these last five shows in Europe because … we’ve done 128 shows so far, but… pic.twitter.com/PQyeZS5Eq0
— Variety (@Variety) December 12, 2025
Taylor Swift wrote on Instagram in August 2024 that calling off those shows made her feel guilty, thinking about fans who’d spent months saving up and planning trips. But then she was thankful that her fans were upset about missing concerts, not mourning actual lives. And if she also talks about another horrid incident that happened right before her London dates, where someone stabbed people at a Taylor Swift dance/yoga class in Southport, UK. Three little girls died, and ten others got hurt.
Swift tells us she had to let all her feelings out before seeing the victims’ families. In the docuseries, we can see her mom, Andrea, quietly hand her a tissue so that she can even try to deal with this situation.
The attacker (Axel Rudakubana) was just 18 when he got slapped with a minimum 52-year sentence in January 2025, the BBC reports. The judge called what he did “pure evil” as he went after these girls while they were making bracelets and dancing to Taylor Swift. One of the survivor’s moms said her daughter got “violent, frenzied injuries”, and her dad was broken. Even though the case wasn’t officially labeled terrorism, judges made clear the distinction didn’t matter.
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The first two episodes of The End of an Era are now on Disney+.
NEXT UP: Taylor Swift’s Big Engagement Revelation – “Just Might Never Have Happened”
