Kate Hackett
In July of 2011, Amy Winehouse, British singer and songwriter, died. She was 27 years old and passed away due to alcohol poisoning. The singer battled drug and alcohol abuse for years and struggled with depression and eating disorders. Although she had gone to rehab before her death, was in the hospital for drugs in 2007, and even said in 2010 “I literally woke up one day and was like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore'”, it wasn’t enough to overcome her addictions.
Her addictions were very public and she was very open with her difficulties, which led her to being mocked by the public and the media. Back in 2008, Zoe Lyons’ one-liner about Winehouse self-harming was voted the “funniest joke”. A few weeks after her death, Comedy Central apologized for an episode of Live at the Apollo, which mocked Winehouse and suggested she would die soon.
And even after her death, she continued to be mocked — and not just by unknown online trolls.
WARNING: Pretty graphic, highly distasteful image below.
Three months after her death, Neil Patrick Harris and his husband David Burtka served “The Corpse of Amy Winehouse” at their Halloween party.
Jesse Tyler Ferguson and his husband Justin Mikita were guests; Mikita shared a photo to Twitter captioned “Look who showed up @ActuallyNPH & @GourmetMD’s Halloween party last night. Looking good.”
The photo included showed a rotting, bloody “corpse” with Winehouse’s beehive hairstyle and her tattoos.
The note, which clarified exactly what we were looking at, says that the dish was “Beef ribs, pulled pork, chicken sausage in a spicy BBQ sauce.”
Neither Neil nor David ever addressed the meat platter.
Ten years later, Ashley Reese tweeted again about the platter.
“I cannot believe how many very online people over the age of 25 are just now finding out about Neil Patrick Harris’s disgusting Amy Winehouse cake…” she said.
She continued, “Yea Neil Patrick Harris quite literally had a cake mimicking Amy Winehouse’s corpse for Halloween soon after she died. I’ve loathed that man ever since.”
People were shocked and quickly took to Reddit to express their outrage.
“They could have just had a gross meat platter for Halloween, it didn’t need to have the ‘Amy’ sticker on it. Tasteless even in 2011 (a dark time in our treatment of celebrities with addiction / mental health issues for sure), but despite it being a long time ago, I really think it shows his character (and his husband’s). Mean girls vibes from both of them anyway,” @Italianinsomniac wrote.
As of this writing, Harris still has not commented on the meat platter.
