We Need To Talk About Trey Songz

Note: This piece contains allegations and descriptions of sexual assault.

“This is preposterous. How am I in this video, Trey? After you found me in a closet HIDING because I was so afraid of anymore conflict. Literally my last option was to hide because you all would not listen when I said I did not want to be in the video the FIRST time,” Palmer wrote on her Instagram after a fan sent her a clip of the video. “Just cause you give someone food and alcohol and throw in a little sexual intimidation doesn't mean they will buckle.”

The moment would likely have come and gone had Palmer not been famous. Though the incident initially got a little traction, it was really Palmer’s interview with Wendy Williams that moved the needle. While dishing on the allegations, the talk show host told her millions of viewers that Palmer should have known better and that she had gotten herself into the situation. Williams did what many did to Palmer when they heard her story: She diminished Palmer’s experience by telling her what she should have done. How she should have left the party. That she couldn’t have possibly been that intimidated if she stuck around. That she should have expected Songz to call her accusation out. “You sound crazy, girl, talking about you hid in a closet,” Williams purred as her audience of mostly women giggled and clapped.

We mostly remember Palmer’s response when she arrived for an interview with Williams weeks later and gracefully dragged the host, to her face, by reminding her of the harm victim blaming can do to survivors. “I don’t want to keep [browbeating] that one situation. But I will say, Wendy: I would have loved to turn on your show and saw you be a little bit more compassionate and less accusatory and ridiculing … Because the gag is, you wasn’t there!”

The interview went on to become the stuff of Internet legend—and one of the finest examples of Williams eating crow. But it also became a tragic reminder of the lengths we often go to discredit or gaslight Black women and how little we listen to them when they sound the alarm on perpetrators of sexual violence. In the five years since Palmer first went public, Songz has been named in at least a half-dozen violent crimes—including accusations of rape from multiple women.

With a pile of allegations, the scrutiny Palmer received has now shifted to questioning why we didn't really listen the first time.

Earlier this month an anonymous woman filed a civil lawsuit against Songz, accusing him of anally raping her in 2016. She says the two had had a consensual relationship before she accepted his invitation to a house party. In the suit the woman alleges Songz asked her upstairs to his bedroom, where he then pressed her for anal sex. She turned him down, repeatedly, before demanding that Songz stopped asking. She alleges the singer then pinned her to the ground, ripped off her pants and anally raped her as her screams of agony went unanswered. According to the suit, the woman received medical care during which a sexual assault examination found that she had suffered anal tearing, which might require surgery. She’s seeking $20 million in damages.

The lawsuit is the latest allegation of Songz’s sexual violence following a Twitter disclosure from basketball player Dylan Gonzalez at the end of last year that bluntly stated: “Trey Songz is a rapist. Lord forgive me. I couldn’t hold that in another year.”

These cases add to a mountain of troubling allegations and criminal charges against the platinum-selling R&B star now going back as far as a decade.

At the album release party for Songz’s 2012 effort Chapter V, he was accused of throwing a wad of cash at a fan for snapping a cellphone picture of him, leaving her with a black eye. He was arrested for misdemeanor assault and harassment, and the case was settled out of court.

During an interview with Milwaukee radio station 103.7 Kiss FM, pop singer-songwriter Bebe Rexha shared a story about how the singer approached her, pushed her against a wall, and tried to kiss her at a wedding. "Let's do this," she says Songz told her. As she detailed her discomfort, the male radio host and Cash Cash (a group of male DJs who collaborated with her) interrupted her to make crass sex jokes.

In 2016, Songz was arrested after a Detroit performance on charges of felony assault of a police officer and misdemeanor aggravated assault for injuring a photographer after the venue cut his concert short because of curfew. He was accused of throwing a microphone stand at a photographer and punching the cop with a closed fist. He pled guilty to two reduced counts of disturbing the peace and was sentenced to 18 months of probation, substance screening and anger-management classes. Detroit Police Sgt. Robert Avery and the photographer, Andrew Potter, sued the singer over their injuries, with Avery alleging he suffered a career-ending brain injury and had to undergo a hip replacement. The suit is ongoing.

In 2018, Andrea Buera accused the singer of beating her so badly that she suffered a concussion. Buera, who says that before the incident she and Songz had been friends for about three years, claimed the singer got enraged when she started talking to one of his friends at a party he was throwing for NBA All-Star weekend. A statement from Buera’s lawyer reads, “He called her names, choked her and repeatedly punched her in the face. Several people were present and no one helped her.” Songz was arrested and faced a felony domestic violence charge, but Los Angeles city and district officials declined to pursue the case after the singer’s legal team provided numerous witness statements contradicting Buera’s account and she eventually withdrew the complaint she filed.

During a 2020 appearance on the influential hip-hop podcast No Jumper hosted by Adam22 (himself the subject of numerous accusations of sexual assault and other misconduct), Instagram model Celina Powell and her friend Aliza claimed that Songz took their phones and refused to let them leave his home—holding them hostage, in other words. Powell says she was coerced into doing “some things,” and Aliza alleged the singer urinated on her without her consent, although they didn’t offer any further details or indicate if they planned on pursuing legal recourse.

In January of 2021, cellphone footage of an altercation between Songz and a police officer during a Kansas City Chiefs game went viral. The dustup was allegedly over Songz’s refusal to follow the stadium's coronavirus protocol (a roundabout way of saying he refused to wear a mask). There were no charges filed in the case.

Songz was then sued by Jahuara Jeffries, who accused the singer of sexual assault inside a Miami nightclub after meeting him at a New Year’s Eve party thrown by Sean “Diddy” Combs in 2018. According to the suit (originally filed as a Jane Doe case), Jeffries claims that as she danced on a couch with her friends, the singer digitally penetrated her vagina from behind. The suit also alleges the singer and his driver forcibly removed Jeffries from the vehicle after Songz got angry that she had recorded him with her cellphone, causing her to fall to the ground and scrape her legs. Jeffries also alleges Songz mocked her and threw water in her face; she also claims another woman at the club confided in her that Songz had groped her without consent.

Songz denies the allegations against him. He’s said that some of the accusers were outright lying and hijacking “the movement to fight for the women who actually have suffered harassment and abuse on various levels,” and his legal team is hoping to get Jeffries’ suit dismissed after accusing one of her lawyers, Ariel Mitchell, of bribing witnesses. While the suits with Jeffries, Avery and Potter are ongoing, Dylan Gonzalez is working with an attorney to take legal action against Songz. In addition, he’s currently under investigation by Las Vegas police over a separate incident of sexual assault that allegedly happened at the Cosmopolitan while he was in town celebrating his 37th birthday in November.

Tremaine Aldon Neverson grew up a shy military brat in Petersburg, Virginia. At 14, he discovered he had a voice, but he was reluctant to sing until friends and family encouraged him in high school. When we met him, as Trey Songz, he was young heartthrob singing about making it out of the hood. His debut, I Gotta Make It, announced a gritty soul singer with a sensitive “bad boy” image and a sound inspired by R. Kelly and Luther Vandross. He coasted between lascivious ballads that showed off a beautiful, malleable tenor, and sexy bangers primed for the strip club. Though he didn’t have the fancy footwork of Chris Brown and he wasn’t crafting pop smashes like Ne-Yo or his hero Kelly, Songz had sex appeal. And lots of it. His third album, 2009’s Ready, was an unbridled celebration of his sexual prowess, and records like “Neighbors Know My Name” and “I Invented Sex” leave little to the imagination (with the latter earning him his first No. 1 on the R&B chart).

Songz’s discography is a masterclass on the art of seduction. His albums are stuffed with steamy bedroom jams and sweaty uptempos soaked in hedonism, and his persona is that of the brazen ladies’ man. His music was the product, but so was he—and Songz embraced that. He channeled a sex god persona into music videos that were far too hot for television and he turned his performances into raunchy affairs, allowing his female fans to grope him freely and kiss on his sweaty, bare chest. He was “Mr. Steal Your Girl”—unapologetic in all his horny ways. Songz was catering to an audience who wanted him and he played right into the fantasy like any savvy R&B lothario would.

It’s impossible not to look at this moment of reckoning Songz is facing without thinking about R. Kelly. This was a man we celebrated for being a brilliant R&B and pop savant while looking away from the ugly reality that he had an eye for underage girls and had shown himself to be a violent sexual predator. Even as Kelly rubbed his sexual proclivities in our noses in remarkably blatant ways, he escaped consequence for nearly three decades. It ultimately took multiple trials, a harrowing Emmy-nominated docuseries, broken NDAs, incriminating public meltdowns, testimony from dozens of witnesses, and the tireless work of activists and journalists to get people to stop looking the other way.

Kelly’s case is the ultimate indictment on the barriers that women and girls—especially Black ones—face when it comes to claims of sexual violence. Despite all that we know about how these cases often go unreported, mishandled or altogether ignored, we still needed the #MeToo movement to show us how much cultural work we have to do when it comes to engaging survivors of sexual abuse and holding those in our community accountable. What made docuseries like “Surviving R. Kelly,” “Leaving Neverland” and W. Kamau Bell’s stunning meditation “We Need to Talk About Cosby” so powerful was the work they did to wrestle with our relationships with R. Kelly, Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby, highlighting how our attachments to their fame may have allowed us to ignore the allegations of sexual violence against them (although there are still many of us who will never believe any of the many accusations against any of these men).

While it’s true that far too many of our men have been wrongfully accused and had their lives ruined, or worse, by false accusations of sexual violence, we owe the accusers more than what we’ve given them—which is simple consideration. We didn't with Michael or with R. Kelly, despite how damning the evidence was. And we didn't with Cosby, despite sixty women coming forward to disclose allegations of rape, drug facilitated sexual assault, sexual battery, and other sexual misconduct. Instead we allowed the magic of Michael Jackson and The Cosby Show and our love of R. Kelly's freaky genius to stop us from seeing anything else. We told ourselves we could separate the art from the artist and ignored the rest. Besides, there's always someone out to tear down our men—Cosby was most definitely about to buy NBC if it wasn't for all of those darn women telling on him!

A clear pattern of abusive behavior has crystallized around Songz and although we have the opportunity to do better, we still aren't. We ignored Palmer, and the focus on Powell and her friend's story was largely framed around the salaciousness of Songz's alleged kink for Golden Showers and not the fact that it was another instance where he ignored a lack of consent. Two months after Powell and her friend made their claims against Songz, he released his eighth studio album, “Back Home,” which came and went without any mention of his personal troubles—though the lack of attention could also be attributed to the fact that Songz's is "Blackfamous," as writer Michael Harriot coined, and as we've seen with Kelly and Jackson and Cosby it's challenging to have a conversation around

But now that there have been three accusations of sexual assault in as many months against Songz, Palmer’s old interviews are receiving fresh consideration. The moment with Wendy Williams has aged terribly for the TV host—especially in comparison with how the late Larry King approached the subject in his interview. But I’ve been thinking the most about what Palmer said on The Breakfast Club a year after sitting with Wendy. At this point Andrea Buera’s case had become public, giving her case more traction than Palmer’s story, and she had been treated with far less ridicule. “If I say something, I’m saying something for a reason… And I feel like so many times, Black women say stuff and nobody gives a shit—excuse my language. Nobody gives a FUCK when sometimes Black women say something,” she tells the hosts. “But somebody of another complexion, somebody of another color, they say something and then it’s like, ‘We’re taking it to court! It’s time to get serious #MeToo.’”