XXXTentacion Discussed Sex, Violence, and Donald Trump in Recorded Prison Phone Calls After 2016 Arrest
Note: This article contains descriptions of alleged domestic violence and assault that some readers may find disturbing.
Last month, Pitchfork reported on a previously confidential recording of the late Florida rapper XXXTentacion (born Jahseh Onfroy), in which he discussed abusing his ex-girlfriend, stabbing multiple people, and committing other violent acts. An acquaintance of XXXTentacion’s made the recording without his knowledge around the time of the rapper’s arrest, on October 8, 2016, on charges of aggravated battery of a pregnant woman, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and witness tampering. According to the alleged victim, he held her head underwater in a bathtub, routinely broke clothes hangers against her body, and threatened to sexually assault her with a grilling fork. The case was closed when XXXTentacion, who pleaded not guilty and publicly maintained his innocence throughout, was shot and killed in June at the age of 20.
Following the October 2016 arrest, XXXTentacion spent almost six months in jail for violating his house arrest on two previous charges, armed home invasion robbery and aggravated battery with a firearm (he ultimately pleaded no contest). While incarcerated at Metro West Detention Center outside Miami, the rapper made hundreds of phone calls. The calls were recorded, and the Miami-Dade County state attorney’s office entered more than 200 of those phone calls into evidence. Pitchfork has obtained the first 59 of these calls to be officially made public, totaling more than 16 hours of audio.
Improbably enough, XXXTentacion placed this vast block of calls during just 46 hours: between 11:48 p.m. on October 25, 2016 and 9:41 p.m. on October 27, 2016. That brief span of time included an October 27 court date in the robbery case. In the calls, XXXTentacion can be heard expressing a range of emotions about his hopes he would be released and his disappointment on learning he would not be.
XXXTentacion’s jail calls offer an unusual and at times luridly intimate glimpse of an internet-borne celebrity who still casts a large shadow over pop culture—and personifies the music industry’s struggles to address the post-#MeToo climate—even after his passing; his songs have been streamed literally billions of times, and he has posthumously appeared on tracks with Lil Wayne and Skrillex. In calls lasting from a few minutes to a half hour, he spoke with what appeared to be friends, associates, former lovers, and his mother, often in three-way conversations connected by another person on the line. The calls evince a tempestuous, troubled 18-year-old, repeating himself often and sometimes chuckling inexplicably, as he delivered crude banter, harsh threats, and despondent murmurs. “I swear if I had the opportunity to sell my soul, bruh, I would do it,” XXXTentacion said in one of the calls. “To just make the rest of life fucking easy, bruh, because this shit is just too much.”
XXXTentacion knew full well his prison calls were on tape: An automated voice warned participants that they were being recorded, and more than once, XXXTentacion can be heard cautioning his interlocutors to watch their words. “I’m on the jail phone so don’t talk too brazy,” he told one woman, and laughed. The risk of the calls turning up in court didn’t deter XXXTentacion from discussing the domestic abuse case. He told the same woman, “I guess the detective was asking you questions and I guess you didn’t answer ’em right.”
He scoffed at the allegation he’d imprisoned the ex-girlfriend, wondering aloud about her to another woman, “How did I keep you hostage if you managed to leave, you fucking bitch, bruh?” His description of his ex-girlfriend’s departure from the apartment where he allegedly held her captive matched what she would allege months later in her deposition. “I swear to god, bruh,” he recalled, “I was in the fucking living room playing Minecraft with my fucking fans, and this bitch disappears.”
In the calls, XXXTentacion maintained that his ex-girlfriend “got jumped,” though he did not specify by whom. He denied that she was ever pregnant, even when another woman read him a message conveying that the ex-girlfriend miscarried (he acknowledged in the calls that he had originally believed she was pregnant but insisted a document he had posted online proved she was not). He also told this woman, apparently referring to the alleged domestic abuse, “Even if I did some shit like that, to you or anyone around you, bruh, I know you wouldn’t go put me in fucking jail.”
One especially fraught conversation about XXXTentacion’s ex-girlfriend took place on the afternoon of October 26, when he told a woman, “I already got what I wanted, I already bashed her face—her face on the internet, bruh, I done made her look bad on the internet, bruh.” Later that day, an audio clip from the call was posted on Instagram of XXXTentacion saying he “bashed her face” without the hurried clarification. During a subsequent call that afternoon, a woman told XXXTentacion about the Instagram post. “She’s so stupid because now I’m about to go all out on her,” he said. “I got something for this bitch-ass. She should have never done this. I got a video, bruh.” He then asked a man to send him a specific humiliating video of his ex-girlfriend. (The description matches a video that was posted to YouTube days later.) “Bruh, that’s what I liked about her,” XXXTentacion told a woman later that night, giggling over a different story about degrading his ex-girlfriend. “She would just do anything I said.”
In the same conversation as the “bashed her face” comment, he told the woman on the line, “I’m not threatening you”; he then went on to point out, “You do not have a restraining order on me or the many people that I know,” adding, “Just keep my name out ya mouth, or I’ma make sure you go to jail for a very, very, very long fucking time, and I’ma make sure that all that money you got go to shit.” When their tense discussion ended, he said, “Somebody need to beat [her] up.” Reflecting on their exchange, he added, “I loved every second of that because you could hear the fear.”
XXXTentacion also flashed anger over matters far less weighty than the domestic abuse charges. He frequently fumed that people had stolen his laptop charger or worn his clothes while he was locked up. As the Miami New Times was first to report, XXXTentacion ordered his friends to beat up a 16-year-old acquaintance who he suspected of allowing others to use XXXTentacion’s cellphone and repost songs on the rapper’s SoundCloud. XXXTentacion told his friends that the boy “needs to get his face fucked up,” and that, “If I get out I’ma catch another charge fucking him up, bruh.” The boy was evidently put on the phone, and XXXTentacion told him, “Shut the fuck up before I make them slap you and make you suck a dick on camera.” Afterward, he added, “Beat that boy ass. I’ma call back. I want that man ass beat.”
As befits a SoundCloud rap poster child, XXXTentacion focused intently on his digital metrics. When “you’re viral,” he quipped to one woman, “you ain’t gotta do nothing, you just gotta talk shit.” He claimed that he made more than $1,000 a day simply through selling clothing and getting paid to repost other people’s songs on SoundCloud. He said that as soon as his SoundCloud follower count reached 100,000, “I’m gonna drop a whole nut” (it’s currently at 2.9 million). He asked a man he said was his manager about how many of his SoundCloud songs were “monetized,” exclaiming, “I’m thinking when we finally do get a check from SoundCloud it’s gonna be fat, bruh.” He boasted about the number of likes his mugshot got on Instagram. Even from behind bars, his ambitions were undiminished. “I found the agent company that Kanye has, A$AP Rocky has, Diplo, Skrillex,” he said in one call. In another, he predicted, “I’ll dominate the whole country. I’ll be bigger than Drake.”
With the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton looming at the time of the calls, XXXTentacion told a woman, “Once Trump get in it's over for all the minorities pretty much.” He went on to say that “you gotta realize, that president shit is real. That’s why niggas be sayin’ make sure you vote.” Later, he told another woman that he didn’t want Trump to win, because “the lower classes are gonna be fucked.” But he wasn’t much more positive about Trump’s Democratic rival. “Yeah, Hillary’s garbage too,” he said. “Hillary wants to make abortion illegal, she wants to take away our guns.” (Clinton’s platform was in support of a woman's right to choose and commonsense gun policies.)
It’s not rare for teenagers’ marathon phone sessions to veer off in weird directions, and the sheer fact of XXXTentacion’s coarse conversational detours being recorded sometimes lent them an ironic levity. “You are getting very wet, you are taking off your panties, you are going to put a cherry up your asshole,” he told one woman shortly after 11 p.m. on October 26. He laughed, and continued, “If my fucking prosecutor ever plays these phone calls, it’s over with. They’re going to be like, ‘We’re not prosecuting him. He deserves to be free. He’s a strange young fellow.’”
Exulting when he thought his lawyer might get him released, XXXTentacion half-sang to one of the women, “I’m coming home/I want the world to know/I want to let it show,” in an update of Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out.” In separate conversations, he asked two different women out to dinner with him at Benihana. “Them niggas be flipping the knives right in front of you,” he enthused. “It’s lit!” He sang advertising jingles for Klondike and Nationwide. He sent up DJ Khaled, shouting, “DJ Khaled! We the best! I didn’t do shit on this motherfucking song, but say we the best! I’m making money worldwide just for saying we the best! That’s another check! We the best!”
His musings sometimes veered into darker territory. “I’m a big walking demon,” he told a woman. Speaking with another woman, he said, “Did I ever tell you I have the mark of the beast?”
In the calls, XXXTentacion claimed to have had sexual relationships with at least two of the women he spoke with, and he promised a third woman, who was evidently seeing somebody else, “You’re mine in the long run.” He cajoled these women, insisted that they missed him, reminded them of their shared sexual experiences together, teased them by calling them fat or ugly, and told a couple of them he loved them. They told him they loved him, too. “I never did nothing crazy to you,” he told one woman, referring to their past relationship. “Besides beating up your car. I got mad. Pow pow. Fucked that car up.” To another woman, he said, “You’re free? No, ma’am, I’ve got a grip on that pussy, thank you very much.” In a call with a woman he said was his mother, he summed up his prison-phone flirtations, telling her, “I’m just playing with all these little girls’ hearts.”
He spoke with the woman who seemed to be his mother several times, often taking a plaintive tone. He told her, “I done put my mom through a lot and she still fuck with me. I’m just happy I got you is all. You probably think I’m trying to butter you up.” He added, “I’m just trying to talk to my mom and not be depressed. What do you want me to do?” The conversation went on, and he said, “Mummy, this gonna sound weird and it’s probably gonna make you mad but [the alleged victim] reminded me so much of you.”
There were also moments that suggested he had an urge toward rehabilitation. “I wanna do something good with the power that I get,” he told a woman. When reminded that he had evidently called himself a bad person, he shot back, “Bad people do good things.” He also exhibited a thirst for information about new-age spirituality, asking one woman to search “how to align your chakras” online. He told her, “I need to figure out how to open my third eye.”
In the meantime, there was no escaping his physical reality, with the prison’s automated voice incessantly reminding him exactly where he was calling from. XXXTentacion told one man, “I just wish I was close to my mom… but I ruined that relationship too.” He added, “I don’t blame nobody else but myself.” On the phone to the woman he identified as his mother, XXXTentacion said, “You gotta stop speaking like there’s still no chance. There’s still a chance. I’m not dead yet.”
If you or someone you know has been affected by domestic violence and need to talk, we recommend this resource:
The National Domestic Violence Hotline
https://thehotline.org
1-800-799-SAFE (7233)
