THE BEAST

Lauren, who was in the photo pit with several other photographers, recounts the incident to Variety:

“Josh was coming over and I was pretty excited, I’ve never actually photographed Queens Of The Stone Age before, I was really looking forward to it. I saw him coming over and I was shooting away. The next thing I know his foot connects with my camera and my camera connects with my face, really hard. He looked straight at me, swung his leg back pretty hard and full-blown kicked me in the face. 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 retreated to the press room to tend to her face, then eventually returned to the pit to shoot Thirty Seconds to Mars and Muse before heading to the ER at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for treatment. Lauren plans to press charges against Homme today, stating:

“I feel like if I don’t do anything, he gets to kick people in the face and not get in trouble because he’s a musician. That’s not right.”

Take a look at video of the incident below:

Via MetalSucks

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A post shared by Chelsea Lauren (@chelsealaurenla) on Dec 9, 2017 at 11:38pm PST

Homme has now issued two apologies to Lauren. The first came in the form of a weakly worded written statement via QOTSA’s Instagram account that attempted to explain away Homme’s action as “in a state of being lost in the moment:”

“Last night, while in a state of being lost in performance, I kicked over various lighting and equipment on our stage. Today it was brought to my attention that this included a camera held by photographer Chelsea Lauren. I did not mean for that to happen and I am very sorry. I would never intentionally cause harm to anyone working at or attending one of our shows and I hope Chelsea will accept my sincere apology.”