Source: Marcus Ingram / Getty
Last Friday, a federal appeals court upheld the 20-year sentence for child porn and child sex trafficking handed down to disgraced singer and songwriter R. Kelly. Two days before that happened, Benzino, for some inexplicable reason, decided to solidify himself as a protector of sexual predators and a person who is the absolute worst at reading the room by declaring that Kelly should be given a “second chance” during an interview with the We in Miami Podcast, which aired on Wednesday.
From XXL:
“Again, the legal age is 16 years old,” Benzino said around the 12-minute mark below. “Does that make it right if a n***a does it? Yes or no?”
The hosts all collectively agreed it was still “disgusting” and “wrong” for a grown man to date a 16-year-old.
“Alright but it’s legal in America,” Benzino said. “Why the f**k is R. Kelly doing all this time? You know why because they’re 14 and 13. Two years younger. But you don’t think that the people who cleared it for 16 years old didn’t know that they were f**king with 13, 14-year-olds, too. For the age that young to be the law, you already know they goin’ under that. I’m not condoning with little girls, it’s sick. Alright, it’s sick, but I don’t think R. Kelly should rot in jail for 30 years either.”
Yeah—Benzino definitely should have just continued embarrassing himself by beefing with Eminem instead of finding a new and far more damaging way of going about it.
Besides the fact that the age of consent in both Illinois and New York, where he has been convicted of sex crimes, is 17, not 16, nothing about the “Boottee” rapper’s argument makes sense. If Benzino understands that Kelly’s victims were as young as 13, why is he even mentioning the age of consent, which he doesn’t appear to understand isn’t the same for every state and isn’t 16 in the states related to Kelly’s cases regardless? And if he thinks the horrific crimes Kelly was convicted of are so “sick,” why is he going so far out of his way to advocate for the perpetrator of such “sick” crimes?
Also, it’s not like allegations of sex crimes against underage girls haven’t followed Kelly nearly throughout his career. It’s not as if it isn’t well-known that he married a 15-year-old Aaliyah at the age of 27. The accusers who got him convicted are far from his only accusers. The Pied Predator’s reputation for peeing on young girls didn’t develop out of thin air.
Suffice it to say, once the fine folks on X got ahold of the footage of Benzino serving as the real-life version of the Black people on that one episode of The Boondocks, they were, to say the least, unkind.
Y’all know what time it is—let’s look at some of the responses
