Musings on the Afroman Defamation Case

Afroman dressed up for his court date.

Curmie has one piece about 80% written and two or three others pretty much blocked out in his head, but let’s go with the Saga of Afroman, who successfully defended a lawsuit for defamation this week.  If ever there was a definition by example of the Streisand Effect, this is it.  Curmie admits he’d never heard of Afroman (Joseph Foreman), or of “Lemon Pound Cake,” (the best-known of his responses to a botched raid on his property) or indeed his Grammy-nominated single “Because I Got High.”  But now, even the hopelessly uncool Curmie knows who he is, and, perhaps more relevantly, about that raid in August of 2022.

That raid, conducted by the sheriff’s office in Adams County, Ohio (that’s southeast of Cincinnati, along the Kentucky border), happened when our hero was out of town.  Yes, they did indeed kick the door in, cause considerable damage to the gate, cut the cords to his home security video system, and seize a significant amount of cash.  The warrant was for drug trafficking and kidnapping, and there was no evidence that could lead to a prosecution.  Oh, and the cops apparently refused to pay for the financial damage they caused, let alone the trauma inflicted by waving assault weapons in at least the general direction of Foreman’s kids, both tweens at the time.

That said, the warrant existed, and it wasn’t issued by the cops themselves.  If there was indeed a reasonable suspicion that there was kidnapping involved, then the whole weapons-drawn, kicking-down-the-door business is at least understandable.  And we have only Afroman’s testimony that the amount of cash returned was less than what was seized.  Indeed, we have only his word about the destruction to the property, although there doesn’t seem to be any denial forthcoming from the sheriff’s office.  More troubling are the lyrics to the newly released “Randy Walters Is a Son of Bitch,” which includes the line “that’s why I fucked his wife and got filthy rich.”  Completely apart from the language issue, there’s the suggestion of impropriety by Walters’s wife, and he’s got no legitimate beef with her, even if he does with her husband.  It appears to be the case that the officers in question were, at least at the raid itself, simply doing their jobs and executing a warrant; it is certainly true that some of the stuff in those videos was vicious and vengeful.

Anyway, the cops (seven of them!) sued for defamation to the tune of $3.5 million.  There were all kinds of courtroom histrionics, including Sgt. Walters testifying that he doesn’t know whether the allegations about his wife are true or not and Officer Lisa Phillips crying on the stand when viewing one of Afroman’s taunts (proving either that she doesn’t have the stuff to be a cop or that she got some really bad advice from her attorney).  Afroman himself, of course, completely controlled the narrative during his own testimony, remaining steadfastly on the offensive.

And that’s certainly one of the messages here: don’t sue someone who is smarter than you, funnier than you, accustomed to being a performer, and rich enough to hire a top-notch legal team... certainly not for a jury trial.  But should those be legitimate criteria?  Everyday folks have rights, too, and the cops were initially highlighted not because they did anything wrong, per se, but because they were easily identifiable.  There seems to have been little if any attempt to place blame on whoever provided the presumably false testimony that led to the warrant, or on the judge who signed off on it.  And surely the majority of the cops on the scene shouldn’t be expected to pay for repairs to the premises with their own money.  Moreover, we can reasonably assume that the money Afroman raised directly or indirectly from a viral video far exceeded the cost of the repairs to his residence.

It’s also true that the notion of being a public figure is, or at least ought to be, on a continuum.  At one end of the spectrum are celebrities of whatever description; at the other end are the overwhelming majority of us, people unknown except to their friends and associates.  The county sheriff would be between those extremes, but closer to the latter than to the former.  Is he a sufficiently “public individual” to allow greater latitude to someone ridiculing him, even up to the point of saying things that are gross exaggerations or even untruths?  Are his subordinates?

Is it relevant, therefore, that some of the things Afroman sings about never happened?  He wasn’t there to hear the glass break, for example.  He also says in his court testimony that his kids saw him being threatened.  They didn’t, and there’s a difference between what he puts in a song and what he says on the witness stand. 

Curmie’s initial response to the verdict in the Afroman case was a combination of celebration and laughter.  That’s in large part because the overwhelming majority of cops Curmie has encountered—whether he was reporting a crime, getting stopped for speeding, or anything in-between—have been self-important jackasses, and the small-town version is particularly obnoxious, because they’re also, generally, rather stupid.  Curmie shouldn’t assume that the small-town cops in question here fit that description, but that hypothesis has so far not been disproven.  And the fact that the ACLU and a host of other civil liberties organizations applauded the verdict tells us something.

It’s unsettling, though, that Afroman is also pretty much a jerk.  He’s clever and charismatic, but that doesn’t make him other than cruel and vindictive.  It’s also true that, as someone said in a comment on one of those YouTube videos, this episode has extended his career by 15 years.  Yes, his legal victory brought a refreshing break from whatever other stories appeared in the daily doomscrolling, but there’s something disquieting, too.

Afroman is the hero we need.  Whether he is the hero we deserve is up for debate.