The rapper Afroman did not defame seven sheriff’s deputies or invade their privacy when he put out a series of catchy, flamboyantly insulting music videos about them after they raided his home in 2022, an Adams County, Ohio jury ruled on Wednesday.
In a three-day trial that pitted two very different notions of personal outrage against each other, Afroman, whose legal name is Joseph Foreman, successfully argued that he had a First Amendment right to mock the deputies, as public figures, and that the over-the-top lyrics of his viral songs could not reasonably be taken as literal statements of fact.
Decked in an American flag-patterned suit and matching sunglasses, Afroman — best known, before the videos that brought him into court, for his 2000 hit “Because I Got High” — turned the proceedings into a display of virality, using the witness stand as one more platform to present the raid as a serious act of wrongdoing, and to insist on his power to make fun of it.
“After they run around my house with guns and kick down my door,” he said during the trial, “I got the right to kick a can in my backyard, use my freedom of speech, turn my bad times into a good time.”
In August 2022, a squad of deputies from the Adams County Sheriff’s Office broke down his door with weapons in hand. He wasn’t home at the time, but a family member recorded videos of the search on their phone, and footage from the house’s security cameras shows the officers tearing through his kitchen.
The officers had a warrant to search for evidence for drug trafficking and kidnapping, according to celebrity.land news affiliate WCPO, but they failed to find anything that would justify charges. By Afroman’s account, the officers left his house torn apart, cut his security video cords, took cash from his home — officials later announced that deputies had merely miscounted the money — and traumatized his kids.
So Afroman took his anger, and his case, to the internet, working to outmaneuver the deputies in the court of public opinion. After uploading the footage of the raid onto his Instagram page shortly after the incident, Afroman remixed it into multiple YouTube videos over the following months — even releasing an album titled “Lemon Pound Cake,” after the moment in the footage in which an officer apparently did a double take at the cake sitting on Afroman’s kitchen island.
“The Adams County Sheriff kicked down my door / Then I heard the glass break / They found no kidnapping victims / Just some lemon pound cake,” he croons in the title track. The music video, from 2022, has more than 3 million views on YouTube.
Beyond criticizing the raid, the barrage of videos also attributed various personal, professional and sexual transgressions to the deputies. The deputies claimed that these were intentional lies that harmed their reputations and made their lives and their jobs more difficult. Deputy Lisa Phillips wept on the stand during a courtroom playing of the song and video “Licc’em Low Lisa,” which fictitiously portrayed her having sex with multiple women.
Asked on the stand about Phillips being upset about the video, Afroman compared it to his own experience, saying she had been standing “in front of my kids with an AR-15, with her hand around the trigger ready to shoot me.
“But I’m not a person. She is,” he said. “I’m sorry for being a victim. Let’s talk about the predators.”
As the officers involved pursued legal action, bringing more attention to the videos, commenters on the videos rallied in support of Afroman.
“Afroman making the whole second half of his career off that raid,” one said.
“Watch the videos and laugh your a** off but also pay attention to what’s happening in court,” another said. “Afroman is standing up for all our rights right now.”
Robert Klingler, the lawyer for the deputies, appealed to a different sense of shared values in his closing argument, telling the jury that “a search warrant execution that you think was unfair…doesn’t justify telling intentional lies designed to hurt people.”
“That’s what decent people think,” Klingler said. “But Mr. Foreman thinks it’s okay to do what he’s done over 3 1/2 years because they executed a search warrant that broke down his door and disconnected his cameras.”
That was, in fact, the split between the worldviews of the two sides: Was it a bigger offense against one’s privacy and dignity to have armed agents of the government physically burst into one’s home and ransack it looking for nonexistent evidence of a crime, or to be laughed at by millions of people on the internet?
But Afroman’s lawyer, David Osborne Jr., argued in closing that one didn’t even need to share the rapper’s perspective to accept his right to vent his feelings in music and lyrics. “Lemon Pound Cake” and the rest were commentary — just like N.W.A’s “F**k tha Police,” Osborne said, citing that once-outrage-inducing track as part of the canon of accepted American self-expression.
Afroman’s more extreme lyrics, Osborne said, were like the lyrics to “WAP” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion (“Carly B” and “Megan Three Stallion,” as Osborne put it). Earlier in the trial, the ex-wife of one of the deputies had testified that, as a schoolteacher, she had witnessed children playing that song and “Lemon Pound Cake” and that in neither case had they taken the words for literal truth.
“That’s all entertainment,” Osborne said. “They made fun of everybody for entertainment. And some of it is a social commentary, but it is not fact. And everybody knows that. Nobody looks at Lil Wayne’s song, ‘P*ssy Monster,’ and says there’s a monster in that song.”
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