Tell It Tuesday: Hey Charlamagne, It’s Still Rape, Even If You Marry Your Victim

By Ta-ning Connai 

Charlamagne tha God has become widely known as the brash and in your face host of the syndicated radio show, The Breakfast Club. While notorious for rubbing many of his on-air guests the wrong way (like when Birdman said, “Put some RESPECK on my name!”), it’s some disturbing information from a few years back that now has everybody up in arms.

A 2015 audio podcast has recently resurfaced where Charlamagne gives a chilling account of how he had sex with a woman after spiking her drink with Spanish Fly. He indecisively teeters back and forth about whether she was incoherent at the time and that’s when my jaw literally hit the floor. 

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He goes on to proudly state that, although he let his friends see her naked, he denied their pleas to have sex with her too. He said this all while laughing his head off, and the idiot asking the questions seemed to be having a good time too. Charlamagne then justifies that he and the woman had already had discussions about “eventually” hooking up, as if consent for the future is like a rain check from the past. Now I’ve officially heard it all!

According to his account, she wakes up the next morning to ask, “What happened?” which means if she didn’t know, she did not give consent. Upon learning what took place, she was relieved that it was Charlamagne, as opposed to all of his friends, she had sex with, BUT she kept having to ask him because she wasn’t really sure. Now, when you mix Spanish Fly, a blackout, sex and no consent, RAPE is what you call it.

Social media is fueling with outrage and petitions for Charlemagne’s job are being formed. But here’s where the story gets twisted

…Because she ended up marrying this fool (oh yes she did), what does it now all mean? Some who initially said rape are now claiming that it’s not. But when a man beats a woman (for example), calling it domestic violence isn’t based on whether she presses charges or not, right? And if she ends up marrying him, like so many victims do, that doesn’t mean the abuse never took place. See, the sad truth is that some women accept abuse all the time and some don’t even realize it ever happened.

Case in point, my friend realized her ex-boyfriend raped her 20 years after the fact. She said they had a bad relationship for years, but every time they broke up, they got back together again. One day she got the strength to leave for good and she never went back. Late one night, she heard him yelling at her window. She could tell he was drunk and figured he just needed a place to crash. She didn’t hesitate to let him in, because, after all, she knew the guy. But when she left him on the couch and headed back to her room, he yells, “I heard what you did!”

Turns out my friend had been having “relations” with a guy her ex kinda knew, but technically they weren’t friends. So when she turned around to set him straight, he grabbed her by her neck. Because she suddenly feared for her life, she just flowed with what she knew was coming next.

When I carefully asked her why she didn’t know it was rape, she explained that her brain went into protective mode. She said she subconsciously reframed the rape in a way that she could live with; she told herself that since they had been on-again-off-again so many times before, maybe he thought they were on again. Or that maybe he thought it was all cool, since she didn’t exactly fight him off. The excuses for her perpetrator were endless and the way she blamed herself was pretty sad. Plus, she’d never heard of a rapist being someone you know, so she was kind of confused about that too.

Proverbs 14:12 says, “There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.” 

We can reframe the things that happen to us all we want, but if we refuse to see things for what they really are, eventually they will come back to haunt us. My friend thought ignoring the rape was the best thing to do, yet every relationship she had after was doomed before the start. She had to mourn her past from a place of truth and only then was she free to heal. 

Do you think that rape isn’t rape if you’re dating the person? How about if they drug you?