Afrika Bambaataa has denied all allegations of sexual abuse that several men have recently made against him with claims that he abused them when they were teens in the 1980s. In his first interview about the subject, the hip-hop pioneer spoke with Fox 5 New York and said that the allegations came as a shock to him.
"I never abused nobody. You know, it just sounds crazy to people to say that, hear, 'You abused me,' " Bambaataa said. "You know, my thing is, you know all my people back then; you know the hundreds of people that been around me. If something like that happened, why you never went to none of them?"
So far, three men have claimed that they were sexually abused by Bambaataa when they were teens, and most recently, Bambaataa's former bodyguard said he witnessed the rapper being sexual with male teens back in the day. Ronald Savage, 50, was the first man to come forward with such claims and said the abuse started when he was 13 years old.
Bambaataa scoffed at his claims.
"The brother knows the people who he came around in my group with, and knows that he wasn't in my presence unless among those people, and he needs to go back and speak to those people who were part of our organization and deal with them," Bambaataa said. "And stop all this type of craziness that they been trying to put by attacking me."
"I ain't touched this brother whatsoever," Bambaataa said.