Several Cops Paid To Have Afroman Humiliate Them for a Second Time

Afroman had not crossed my mind in some time. I was in middle school when his signature hit Because I Got High came out, thought it was funny, and often had concerned parents tell me, “You know the point of the song is that getting high is bad, right?” I was in middle school, not an idiot, but given that my vice of choice these days is marijuana, perhaps they were right to warn me. We’ll never know! Regardless, Afroman worked his way into my brain again yesterday thanks to a very public trial.

Afroman (whose real name is Joseph Foreman) was being sued by several Ohio police officers who claimed that he used their likenesses without their permission and defamed them in the process. Why do they claim that? In 2022, they filed a search warrant for Foreman’s residence under drug trafficking and kidnapping, broke into his home, found no evidence of either crime, never charged him, took around $400 (which they later returned), and Foreman made several songs about it. One, called Lemon Pound Cake, went viral.

Lemon Pound Cake uses footage from security cameras that Foreman had set up in his home, which show the officers busting in with their guns drawn. In one of the funnier exchanges from the trial, the officer who Lemon Pound Cake is about is forced to watch the video again, in front of a jury and, now, most of the internet. It is a privilege he presumably paid a lot of legal fees for, which is pretty wild. Unsurprisingly, the jury sided with Foreman.

Foreman took to the stand on Tuesday, clad in an American flag suit that looked amazing (but not as incredible as his Texas Rangers/marijuana hybrid suit in the header, which I am adding to my Amazon wishlist), and laid out a pretty good summation of why he is not at fault. “All of this is their fault,” he explained. “If they hadn’t wrongly raided my house, there would be no lawsuit, I would not know their names, they wouldn’t be on my home surveillance system, and there would be no songs … my money would still be intact.” Makes sense to me!

“I didn’t win, America won,” he later stated after the jury voted in his favor, according to WCPO in Cincinnati. “America still has freedom of speech. It’s still for the people, by the people.” This is a feel-good, FAFO kind of story. Those cops wouldn’t have been ruthlessly mocked had they not abused their positions to break into Foreman’s home. They brought this on themselves. And then, shockingly, they did it again.