WARNING: Stop reading immediately if you don’t want to know who was kicked off of last night’s episode of The X Factor. For everyone else, read on for the exit interview with the act to leave the show this week:
Nino Munoz/Fox
Rachel Crow collapsed when Steve Jones announced her exit from X Factor, but the eternally cheerful 13-year-old was all smiles when she spoke to the press 90 minutes after the show. “You know, I’m not feeling great, but I’ll be fine,” she said.
Crow was ultimately the victim of America’s vote, after Nicole Scherzinger could not choose between Crow and Marcus Canty. Scherzinger was booed offstage, but Crow insisted that there were no hard feelings. “She told me she’s sorry,” Crow said. “I don’t know why. She was like, ‘I’m so sorry. I was not expecting that.’ I was like, ‘It’s okay. It’s not your fault.’”
Scherzinger later told reporters that she only tied the vote as a means to gracefully eliminate Canty, never suspecting that Crow would have garnered less support. Crow admitted that this had also crossed her mind. “Marcus has been in the bottom two,” she said. “I think, honestly, everybody was thinking that.” Everybody, including Canty himself. “He said, ‘I wasn’t expecting this. I was preparing myself to go home,’” Crow said. “I was like, ‘Why? You’re amazing!’ He was trying to console me. I was like, ‘Console me? Celebrate! Be happy.’”
Crow might also have reason to celebrate in the near future, as all of the judges agreed that she should look forward to a promising career. Her mentor, Simon Cowell, suggested a future with Disney or Nickelodeon, and even compared Crow to a particularly successful American Idol castoff. “Jennifer Hudson is amazing,” Crow gushed. “I can’t even explain. I’m speechless at how amazing she is. Being compared to her, Beyoncé, Etta James — that is quite the thrill right there.”
The headstrong Crow also told reporters that she plans to focus on “retro, 50′s pop,” and insisted that her age was never a negative factor on Factor. “Don’t judge by the age,” she explained. “Sometimes kids take [rejection] better than adults. Even in the very first auditions, the adults were just cursing. The kids that didn’t make it were like, ‘It’s okay.’ I was consoling the adults, which was a little awkward. Don’t judge age, because I’m 13, and I made it to the top five.”
Finally, Crow had words for the diehard fans who hit Scherzinger with death threats last week: “I want to say to all those people, ‘Stop, please.’ She’s the nicest, most beautiful person inside and out. I saw her, and she was crying still. She was so sad. All of those people last week that were saying, ‘Go die,’ — that’s really mean. That’s a mean thing to say. She’s not that bad. She’s really actually nice. I don’t understand why people are taking it out on her. It’s nobody’s fault — it’s not even America’s fault. It’s no one person’s fault, it’s just what God had in store for me. It will be okay.”
