Santiago Felipe
Two years after getting banned on Twitter, rapper Talib Kweli is blaming Jezebel—not his own words—for his social-media exile.
The rapper and activist on Monday filed an angry, sprawling, and typo-riddled lawsuit with the New York Supreme Court against G/O Media, its women-focused site Jezebel, and journalist Ashley Reese. In the 34-page missive, which he filed without a lawyer, Kweli claimed a 2020 Jezebel story written by Reese detailing his “harassment campaign” against a Black woman on Twitter left him in emotional distress and partial financial ruin because the outlet failed to fulfill its “duty” to fully include his perspective.
“The defendant negligently breached that duty by taking all the facts that the plaintiff stated and publishing them on the articles for 11 million plus to witness as they tried every angel [sic] to prove his facts were false, then attacked everything about his career, life, age, family,” he wrote. “The defendants are a women’s magazine, and Talib Kweli was the target to impose…The publications didn’t consider the reaction that would affect Talib’s career with the attempt to harm his reputation.”