Just when you thought Example was scraping the bottom of the barrel for rapper names that start with an X, here comes XXXTentacion, which I’m pretty sure is pronounced “extension.” His debut album, 17, was released two weeks ago and hit number 2 on the Billboard charts, and he’s followed that success up with a 150 page deposition detailing how he tortured and abused his girlfriend for months, a copy of which was acquired by Pitchfork. Wow, sounds like a great guy.
Seriously, this guy makes Chris Brown look like… is there a famous musician who doesn’t treat women like s**t? Ice Cube has been married for 25 years and seems like an excellent husband and father, so let’s go with him. Anyway, there are some brutal details in the deposition.
He slapped her and broke her iPhone 6S, because she had complimented a male friend on his new jewelry. (XXXTentacion later repaired the phone.) Later that day, XXXTentacion left the room and returned with two grilling implements—a “barbecue pitchfork” and a “barbecue cleaner,” she said—and told her to pick between them, because he was going to put one of them in her vagina. She chose the fork. He told her to undress. He was lightly dragging the tool against her inner thigh when she passed out. He did not penetrate her with it.
That’s just fucked up. I don’t understand what makes a human being treat someone like that, honestly. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
When asked during the deposition to “pinpoint the days he threatened to kill you,” the reported victim responded, “Well, when we lived in Orlando, it was literally like every day.”
He seems lovely. He gets even lovelier as this goes on.
About a week and a half into their stint in Orlando, the woman and XXXTentacion were on their way to a show together. They listened to one of XXXTentacion’s songs in the car and she sang along with his verse. Then she hummed along with a verse from a featured artist on the track. After that, XXXTentacion fell silent and left her in the car outside the venue. Inside, they got into a fight. When they arrived home after the show, he took her into the bathroom. “And he was asking me why I was singing his friend’s part of the song, if I like him, why do I like him, like do I ever look at his Twitter,” she said.
Then, XXXTentacion head-butted her, punched her, stomped on her, and put her in the bathtub, where he continued hitting and kicking her. “He also wanted to cut out my tongue because I was singing the song,” she said. She tried to run away down the street. He tackled her, causing her head to hit the pavement. She suffered black eyes, a lump on the back of her head, scratch marks, and bruises, including a large bruise on her ankle where he stomped her.
Okay, I’m just going to stop right there. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. He almost killed her because she sang a part of his song that was sung by someone else. Spin called him “The Most Controversial Man in Rap“, a headline which seriously hasn’t aged well in light of this. I personally don’t see how anyone can read this deposition, which goes on to detail how he almost killed his girlfriend again when she got pregnant because he thought it might be someone else’s, then refused to let her go to the hospital and locked her in a room with bars on the windows, and even want to hear his music.
I know, I’m often saying that we should separate the artist and the person. I’ll watch a Mel Gibson movie even though he’s a crazy anti-Semite. There’s a line, though, and I don’t see how this isn’t so far over the line for everyone that this piece of s**t never sells a single album again. I almost felt physically ill just reading about this to write this article, I can’t imagine seeing it and thinking “Oh, but “Look at Me” has such a sick beat”. That guy who punched him in he face is my new hero.