Last year Black Star rapper Talib Kweli was banned from Twitter after relentlessly cyber stalking a Black woman for weeks after she critiqued him, along with a bunch of other rappers, for exclusively marrying light-skin women.
Now Talib is suing Jezebel for reporting on the incident...
From Jezebel
Rapper Talib Kweli is suing Jezebel for emotional distress that he claims we caused him with our 2020 story, “Talib Kweli’s Harassment Campaign Shows How Unprotected Black Women Are Online and Off.” The piece detailed the then-44-year-old rapper’s social media interactions with and about a then-24-year-old student and activist named Maya Moody—interactions that Twitter found warranted his permanent suspension from the platform. He filed his at-times bizarre and indecipherable suit on Thursday in New York Supreme Court against our parent company G/O Media and the piece’s author, Ashley Reese.
Had Kweli taken issue with the veracity of any of our commentary, he surely would have sued us for libel—but the statute of limitations for libel came and went last year. And so Kweli instead claims our story resulted in a “negligent infliction of emotional distress,” one so deep that he “went into a depression state of loss of appetite, sleeplessness, edgy, anxiety, and discomfort around certain women.” Much as we’d like to, we can’t link to or quote from the Jezebel story in question (per our lawyers), because doing so would risk restarting the statute of limitations clock and creating a multi-part arc that could easily fill out a Law & Order episode. Instead, here is what a Twitter spokesperson said about banning Kweli at the time:
Kweli is asking for $300,000 in damages, or half his salary, he says.
We are legally required to issue the following statement from a G/O Media spokesperson: “Jezebel’s article fairly reported on the controversy which led to the permanent suspension of Talib Kweli’s Twitter account. This suit, filed two years after the story was published, has no merit and the company will be seeking our attorneys fees pursuant to the protections afforded to the press to publish stories about matters of public interest like this one.”
Obviously, we stand by our story.
The Tweet that set everything off.
Literally almost all of them are married to light skinned women but that’s a conversation for another day. https://t.co/vW9QcsD3xa
— Maya Angeliqueđź‘‘ (@moneyymaya) July 9, 2020
