If you have a few minutes today, go back and check your texts and timelines from 2019. That was the year former NFL receiver-turned-Kanye West hypeman-turned-whack-rapper was involved in his most serious scandal to date. Not the one where he quit on the team where he spent his best years, or the one where he almost injured a kid by throwing furniture off a hi-rise patio, or the one where he froze the skin off his feet, or called the GM of his team a cracker, or when he beat up a delivery man who was trying to drop off Brown’s own belongings, or when he was suspended for using a fake vaccination card in the middle of a pandemic, or when he quit on the team he won a Super Bowl with. Not those.
I mean the one where Brown’s former physical trainer accused him of rape and another woman accused him of sexual harassment. Back then, lots of people still believed in Brown, or at least would rather twist themselves up like an abandoned garden hose to defend him than admit that a dude who consistently engaged in trash behavior might actually be capable of doing the most trash thing a trash dude could ever do. Those were also the same people who remained 10 toes down on the notion that Bill Cosby was only charged with rape because he was about to buy NBC and also form a nice concentric circle with people who think Deshaun Watson’s employer shouldn’t be allowed to suspend him because he didn’t go to jail.
But with video going viral this weekend of Brown at a hotel pool in Dubai harassing a woman by putting his bare ass in her face and pulling his penis out as she tries to move away from him, his defenders are extra quiet. You won’t be able to confront them about the video because they’ve either disappeared from your group chat or social media feed. They’re quiet because they’ve run out of bullshit excuses for his act. They’re quiet because they know a dude who acts like this in public, while people have their cell cameras pointed at him, is capable of doing anything in private, including the thing his defenders contorted themselves to deny he would do back in 2019.
So you may need to go back to the archive to remember who his defenders were in your circle, if for no other reason than to remind yourself who you probably should have already muted, blocked and/or deleted.
You’re welcome.