Queens of the Stone Age frontman Joshua Homme apologized for kicking a photographer, who ended up in the emergency room, during the band’s Saturday show in Los Angeles.
— QOTSA (@qotsa) December 10, 2017
The group posted a statement from Homme on social media, including Twitter, in which he said he would “never intentionally cause harm to anyone working at or attending one of our shows.”
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Shutterstock photographer Chelsea Lauren was close to the stage at the KROQ Acoustic Christmas Show when Queens of the Stone Age was performing. She posted a video that appears to show Homme kicking her in the face and knocking her to the ground.
“Thanks to [Josh Homme] [Queens of the Stone Age] I now get to spend my night in the ER. Seriously, WHO DOES THAT?!?” Lauren wrote on Instagram.
She told Variety that the kick was “odiously very intentional.”
“He looked straight at me, swung his leg back pretty hard and full-blown kicked me in the face,” the photographer told Variety. “He continued performing, I was startled, I kind of stopped looking at him, I just got down and was holding my face because it hurt so badly.”
Lauren later took photos of Thirty Seconds to Mars and Muse during their performances, but went straight to a hospital after the concert.
She also posted three photos she took of Homme in the moments before he kicked her.
“Assault in any form is not okay, no matter what the reasoning. Alcohol and drugs are no excuse,” Lauren wrote on Instagram. “I was where I was allowed to be, I was not breaking any rules. I was simply trying to do my job.”
“My neck is a sore, my eyebrow bruised and I’m a bit nauseous,” Lauren wrote of her injuries. “The doctor released me early in the morning.”
Photo credit: Facebook / Queens of the Stone Age
