Music

Cee-Lo Green trivializes rape on Twitter days after admitting to drugging his date

by Tyler Munro

We’ve long thought Cee-Lo Green’s eccentricity was starting to get the better of him. His transition from crooning emcee to a reality TV Dark Heart aside, his Goodie Mob neutering (and lack of any worthwhile output over the past year) has been unfortunate. But whatever: Ideas happen when they do, and we still called ourselves fans. Until now.

As you might have heard, Green is in some legal trouble after pleading no contest to charges that he drugged a woman he’d been out to dinner with. She says she woke up naked in the Gnarls Barkley singer’s bed, but can’t remember how she got there. Cee-Lo knows: He drugged her. But while he admitted to sharing the controlled sentence, his lawyer maintained that any physical contact was consensual. No sexual assault charges were filed.

Rather than leave it at that, though, Green decided to take to Twitter to defend himself, which is never a good idea. Proving that, he deleted the tweets, then his entire account, not long after. @CeeLoGreen is back live again today, but what led to its temporary deletion is almost definitely worse than you’re expecting.

By his logic, it’s not rape if you can’t remember it. This is disgusting. This is a problem. He apologized, but it didn’t help. [ED: And also tacked on a colossal non-apology: “Secondly I sincerely apologize for my comments being taken so far out of context.”] Those tweets have been preserved on multiple sites with screenshots.

“Let me 1st praise god for exoneration fairness & freedom,” he wrote. “I only intended on a healthy exchange to help heal those who love me from the pain I had already caused from this.”

Listen—we can’t speculate on what happened that night. Legally, it’s his word against hers. But when his word trivializes rape, there’s a problem.

Consent is never implied, and not saying “no” is not a yes. When a woman wakes up naked, can’t remember how she got that way and tells the courts that Green later made reference to “slipping” her some ecstasy, his words are less a defence of character and more an endorsement, explicit or otherwise, of rape culture.

Maybe it’s time he stopped calling himself The Lady Killer.

UPDATE: TBS has reportedly decided to end Green’s reality show The Good Life, likely a result of this controversy.