Miley Cyrus reflects on past feud, dedicates song to late Sinéad O’Connor

In an ABC special, Miley Cyrus discussed the decade-old controversial letter from Sinéad O’Connor. The special, Endless Summer Vacation: Continued, featured Cyrus performing, sharing stories from her life, and discussing her music career. 

She also talked about her 2013 hit Wrecking Ball, which marked a more mature image after Disney and her MTV VMA performance with Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams. 

Following Cyrus' Rolling Stone interview where she linked her Wrecking Ball video to O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U, O’Connor wrote an open letter on her website, later published by The Guardian.

“I was expecting for there to be controversy and backlash,” Cyrus said Thursday about her new image and music at the time. “But I don’t think I expected other women to put me down or turn on me, especially women that had been in my position before.”

In the letter that was meant to be from a motherly place, some parts turned heads. Like criticism of Cyrus for “getting naked,” and with lines like, “The message you keep sending is that it's somehow cool to be prostituted.”

At the time, Cyrus responded to the letter negatively, but she since had 10 years to reflect on it, has a different view about it now.

“I had no idea about the fragile mental state that she was in, and I was also only 20 years old so I could really only wrap my head around mental illness only so much,” Cyrus said. 

“And all that I saw was that another woman told me that this idea was not my idea. And even if I was convinced that it was, it was still just, you know, men in power’s idea of me. And they had manipulated me to believe that it was my own idea when it never really was. And it was. And it is. And I still love it.”

In July of this year, at the age of 56, O’Connor was found deceased at her residence in London. However, the cause of her passing remains undisclosed.

Cyrus added that the timing of the letter was unfortunate, coinciding with a period of significant personal change and transformation in her life.

“I think I had just been judged for so long on my own choices that I was just exhausted. And I was in this place where I finally was making my own choices and my own decisions. And to have that taken away from me deeply upset me,” she said, before later adding. “God bless Sinéad O’Connor for real, in all seriousness.”