Balls & Strikes Weekly Update
The rapper Afroman is best known for “Because I Got High,” a lighthearted song about the opportunity costs of marijuana consumption that is guaranteed to bring a nostalgic smile to the face of your nearest Millennial with a bad back. More recently, his music has centered on a very different subject: After the local county sheriff’s office raided his Ohio home several years ago, Afroman responded with a barrage of absurdist music videos that name-checked the individual cops who took part in the raid, mocking them as crooked, bumbling doofuses.
Here, for example, is “Lemon Poundcake,” set to the tune of The Drifters’ 1964 classic “Under the Boardwalk,” which skewers a deputy whom Afroman’s security cameras recorded as he stared down a sweet treat on the kitchen counter like he’d forgotten to eat breakfast.
The following year, the cops decided to sue Afroman, whose government name is Joseph Foreman, for defamation, arguing that his dissemination of hilarious YouTube videos caused them to suffer “embarrassment, ridicule, emotional distress, humiliation, and loss of reputation.” Yesterday, after a delightfully surreal three-day trial, a jury sided with Afroman, who promptly walked outside and celebrated with supporters on the courthouse steps. “When life gives you lemons, you make lemon poundcake,” he told a local TV station.
The saga started back in 2022, when the Adams County sheriff’s office got a warrant to search Afroman’s property for evidence of drug trafficking and kidnapping. Other than a few thousand dollars in cash that they eventually returned, they found nothing of note and made no arrests, and prosecutors never filed any charges.
But the cops did leave behind a broken gate, a broken door, and a very annoyed professional entertainer with (1) a talent for cranking out earworms and (2) a home security system that captured everything on video. The amount of cash returned to Afroman was also $400 less than the amount the deputies counted during the raid. The result? “Will You Repair My Door,” a soulful plea to the cops to go to Home Depot, pick up a framing kit, and come back to clean up their mess.
In court, Afroman argued that his speech is protected under the First Amendment. He also pointed out that he never would have made these deputies go moderately viral if they’d simply done their jobs better, and that under the circumstances, his decision to limit his response to cops breaking down his door with long guns to making novelty songs about the incident demonstrates pretty remarkable restraint.
I am not going to spend too much time on the law here, because I would rather you enjoy this video of Afroman strutting around the countryside, wearing a novelty American flag suit, belting out an ACAB-ified version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But at a very high level, the problem with the cops’ case is that insults and hyperbolic jokes are usually not defamatory, since reasonable people would not interpret them as statements of fact.
This concept was illustrated most clearly at trial by the testimony of Randy Walters, a deputy who admitted that Afroman’s vocoder-assisted characterization of Walters as a “son of a bitch”—in a song titled, of course “RANDY WALTERS IS A SON OF A BITCH”— is a statement of opinion, because it is impossible to prove or disprove whether he is, in fact, a son of a bitch.
The music video for “RANDY WALTERS IS A SON OF A BITCH,” which Afroman released on the first day of the trial, portrays him dancing around in triplicate, still in the suit, while crooning about having “fucked” Walters’ spouse and then gotten “filthy rich.” This is both rude and crude, but again, a reasonable person who views it would understand it to mean that Afroman really, really dislikes Randy Walters. They would not understand the song as an assertion that Mrs. Walters is literally having an extramarital affair with Joseph Foreman.
The case is a very funny illustration of what can happen when cops, who as a general rule rarely face consequences for their actions, manage to cross a person with plenty of time, a sizable social media following, and a smooth baritone. If the sheriff’s office had apologized and offered to pay for the damage they caused, perhaps Afroman would have never recorded these songs. Or if he had, the songs probably would not have become national news, and the jurors would not have a hell of a story to tell at their next high school reunion.
But the cops who sued could not bear the idea of allowing a famous Black man whose home they raided to make them look foolish on the internet. As a result, they had to spend three days getting stuffed into lockers by Afroman and his lawyers, all while thinking about how much less famous they would be right now if, on the day of the raid, they had simply decided to call in sick.
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