Chris Brown thinks rape allegation against him is a conspiracy
He says that every time he drops new music, “they try to pull bullshit.”
Trigger warning: this story contains an allegation of sexual assault.
Rarely does a year go by without another woman calling Chris Brown out for abuse. This week, Brown became the center of a $20 million lawsuit with accusations of him raping a woman on a parked yacht.
According to the suit, the alleged rape occurred on December 30, 2020, after the singer invited an unnamed woman invited to Diddy’s home on Miami’s Star Island. After arriving, Brown provided her multiple mixed drinks in the yacht’s kitchen before she began feeling “a sudden, unexplained change in consciousness,” according to the suit. She claimed she felt drugged and was falling in and out of sleep, but alleged that Brown still led her into a bedroom on the yacht, prevented her from leaving, and began undressing her while unsolicitedly kissing her. From her recollection, Brown ignored her pleas for him to stop and raped her until he ejaculated inside of her and subsequently asked her to take a Plan B pill via text the following day. She claimed to have followed his demand, and she never reported the assault to the police because she was embarrassed about the entire ordeal.
News of the lawsuit appeared on TMZ on Thursday, and it wasn’t long before Brown and his industry friends began victim-blaming and spouting off conspiratorial rants. On Friday morning, Brown seemingly responded to the lawsuit by dismissing it on an Instagram Story, where he points out what he sees as a pattern of character assassination. In his mind, “whenever I’m releasing music or projects, ‘THEY’ try to pull some real bullshit.” An hour later, Tory Lanez, the last man on Earth who should be chiming in on anything related to women being abused, echoed Brown’s sentiments on his own Instagram Story supporting Brown’s conspiracy claim. “I’ve literally never seen the man be nothing but nice as fuck to fans and peers,” Lanez exclaimed. It looks bad, but it gets worse.
Hours after dismissing the lawsuit and getting problematic support from Lanez, Brown posted a photo of himself wearing numerous hats — an attempt to refer to the allegations as “cap,” otherwise known as lies. But an hour earlier, Brown thought it would be wise to post on his main Instagram feed a video of him dancing as part of the #IffyChallenge he started last week. Participants in the challenge are submitting freestyle dance videos to his song “Iffy” for a chance to score a Chris Brown collectible and a spot in a private virtual dance class with celebrity choreographer Josh Smith. There’s just one problem: he chose to highlight the part of the chorus where he sings “can’t trust these hoes ‘cause they iffy” and placed those exact lyrics in the post’s caption, which he hadn’t done for any of the previous videos while promoting the challenge. If he’s using Instagram Stories as his forum to profess his innocence, he’s surely not above using a post on his Instagram feed to slyly disparage the rape accuser in front of his 103 million Instagram followers.
Ever since brutally assaulting Rihanna in 2009, Brown has had a difficult time keeping his name out of the news due to repeated allegations of abusive behavior towards women. He’s been accused of threatening his female tour manager in 2016, holding a woman at his home against her will while a friend of his raped her in 2017, texting his ex-girlfriend Karreuche Tran that he’d “beat the shit” of her in 2017, and pointing a gun at a woman in 2016. Three years ago nearly to the day of these new rape allegations, Brown was accused of raping a woman in Paris during Paris Fashion Week. The accuser in the 2017 incident dropped the lawsuit three years later. There have been no updates made public on the alleged rape in Paris since Brown failed to attend a formal meeting between himself and his accuser as part of the investigation. Tran was granted a five-year restraining order over his threats. He also didn’t face any gun charges for his 2016 incident.
Instead of pointing to some grand conspiracy to ruin a career Brown seems pretty capable of ruining on his own, the multiplatinum artist should focus his efforts on letting these allegations play out in the courts. Responding to every rape allegation by disparaging the character of the victims doesn’t make you look innocent; it makes you look inconsiderate.
