In response to two separate allegations of sexual harassment and assault at his shows – which led to the cancellation of his entire Australian tour earlier this month – Houston rapper Riff Raff has released an incredibly tone-deaf video vehemently denying the accusations and spruiking the creation of the #NotMe movement (ffs, kill me now).
At the start of this month, a number of Australian venues cancelled Riff Raff’s gigs before his promoter pulled the pin on the entire tour, following the dissemination of a Melbourne woman’s accusation that the rapper drugged and raped her after his Melbourne headline spot at Liberty Social in 2013. “I was raped and blamed myself for five years,” she wrote in a Facebook post.
Shortly after, another woman came forward first on Facebook, and then to Jezebel, saying she met Riff Raff at the Milkwaukee leg of the the Warped Tour in 2015, when she was just 17, and that he asked her to sleep with him, touched her and tried to kiss her on his tour bus.
Raff responded to the allegations on June 6 on Facebook in a since-deleted post: “It’s guilty until proven innocent in 2018… nobody can bring me down… only my true people know where I’m at.”
In the video – which we advise you don’t waste 14 minutes of your time watching – Raff’s joined by his attorney, Marc Lazo, a director who cast him in a movie for some reason, Sarah B Downey, his personal assistant, Avery Schiff, and a man who just goes by Kane, his security guy.
It’s Lazo who declares the start of the #NotMe movement to “combat baseless allegations“, holding “people accountable for destroying careers” with “unsubstantiated, unwarranted, defamatory allegations that people make for selfish reasons, for pecuniary reasons, for reasons to advance their own careers at the expense of others, and purely for their own gain“. An unsubstantiated claim, btw.
Riff Raff then weighs in to accuse everyone of lying, and to repeat the phrase “trial by media” ad nauseam. Some of his statements are actually genuinely alarming, like admitting that the first thing he does before a tour is “DM hundreds of girls, thousands of girls“, who are then vetted by Schiff and Kane. Oh and this his idols are Hugh Hefner and Insta party guy Dan Blizerian, sick one. He believes he has the unequivocal “right to party” – a bastardisation of the Beastie Boys if we ever saw one – his video clips acting as commercials for his life: drugs, alcohol, scantily clad women (and Raff himself!) dancin’.
He rants breathlessly while denouncing the charges against him:
Never once have I ever forced anybody to hang out with me – people pay, don’t forget: I’m me
I prayed for my name to be worldwide, nationwide, for everybody to know me, to have sex with beautiful women of age, twos and threes, two and three at a time – that’s what I live for, that’s what I do, everything legal, every single thing.
Never once have I forced a girl to have sex, never once have I forced a girl to do any type of drugs – I don’t wanna have a girl drunk and sleepy. I’ve never once had to drag a girl to a car, because guess what, if she don’t wanna go, Kane, you’re outta here, club’s about to let out, you better hurry up and get some other ones.
Never once have I ever had to drag a girl to a hotel up flights of steps to have sex with a dead starfish in my room. That is not happening. That’s point blank, period.
Well, I’m sure that convinced everybody, and definitely didn’t just make it worse, uh huh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL14jzvm3rA
NOPEEEE. NOPE TO THIS. NOPEEEE.
This article discusses sexual assault. If you would like to talk to a counsellor about rape, sexual assault or domestic violence, give the people over at 1800 RESPECT a call on 1800 737 732.
