After Afroman’s Ohio home was raided by police and searched for evidence of drug trafficking and kidnapping in the summer of 2022, the rap wonder of the early 2000s channeled his frustration into lyrically explicit song.
Several songs, in fact, on an album titled “Lemon Pound Cake,” a derogatory reference to one of the sheriff’s deputies who busted down his front door after a judge granted a warrant, seizing money and disconnecting his security cameras. Afroman — legal name Joseph Foreman — was never criminally charged, and “Lemon Pound Cake” became his public condemnation of the deputies and their tactics.
Then seven of those deputies sued him for defamation, and Afroman spent the past few days in Adams County defending his art at trial — and prevailing. After hours of deliberation Wednesday, the jury ruled in Afroman’s favor on all counts, disagreeing with the deputies’ allegations that the rapper had violated their rights and owed them millions of dollars in monetary damages.
Moments after the trial ended, a video of the judge reading the verdict aloud in court was posted to Afroman’s social media accounts.
The three-day trial explored fundamental questions about policing, the Constitution’s free-speech protections and the limits of artistic criticism. It also unexpectedly catapulted the man behind “Because I Got High” and “Crazy Rap (Colt 45 & 2 Zig Zags)” back into pop culture’s lexicon. A Colorado sheriff’s office that shares the same name as the Ohio one said it had mistakenly received a flood of social media comments and phone calls about the defamation trial. Even the Libertarian Party has weighed in.
The legal saga was live-streamed on local TV and picked up by social media algorithms, surfacing clips from court of Afroman dressed in an American flag suit, tie and sunglasses — and of the deputies testifying about harm they say they suffered from the album and its promotion.
For the song “Will You Help Me Repair My Door,” Afroman made a music video using footage from the raid that showed the deputies faces. He mocked online the genitalia of the female deputy who disconnected his security cameras. In numerous Instagram posts, the rapper promoted his album and tour with T-shirts that featured the faces of the deputies — including the one he dubbed “Police Officer Poundcake.”
During the trial, that officer said he had been sent a plethora of pound cakes at work.
Afroman placed all blame on the deputies.
“The whole raid was a mistake,” Afroman testified. “All of this is their fault. 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. Nothing.”
All seven deputies with the Adams County Sheriff’s Office, which patrols a county of less than 30,000 people in southwestern Ohio, testified at trial, asking for a combined $3.9 million in damages. They alleged in court documents that Afroman defamed them by using their likenesses without permission and causing “humiliation, ridicule, mental distress, embarrassment and loss of reputation.”
Robert Klingler, the deputies’ attorney, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case and verdict.
Lisa Phillips, a deputy sheriff, testified that Afroman called her misogynistic names on social media and created a lengthy parody video depicting a woman who looked like her performing sexual acts on other women. When the deputies’ attorney played the video in court, Phillips wept.
Randy Walters, another sheriff’s deputy, testified that his family had been the subject of gossip and ridicule because of baseless allegations Afroman made online, including that the rapper had an affair with Walters’s wife of 28 years. The harm trickled down to the couple’s biracial daughter, Walters said, who was adopted.
“Now my family has to be harmed because of straight-up 100 percent lies,” Walters said in court. “Where in the world is it okay to make something up for fun that’s damaging to others when you know for sure it’s an absolute lie? That’s a problem.”
On the night of the raid, Afroman was traveling back from a trip to Chicago, but his ex-wife and children were in the house and terrified when deputies busted in the door.
During his trial testimony, Afroman said he intended to use the profits he earned off the “Lemon Pound Cake” album to pay for the damage to his property from the raid, including his front door, broken outside gate and snipped wiring on his surveillance cameras. When asked by the deputies’ attorney how much money he had made off the album and merchandise, Afroman would not say — only answering that it was less than $24,000.
The rapper has continued to mock the deputies online, posting new music videos to social media this week wearing the same patriotic get-up that he donned in court. On one post, he wrote: “Almost to 1m subs! Help a playa get to 1m today!”
Klingler, a civil attorney, said during his closing arguments that Afroman had shown a “callous indifference” on the witness stand and a disregard for the consequences of his actions.
“Mr. Foreman perpetuated lies intentionally, repeatedly over three and a half years on the internet about these seven brave deputy sheriffs who’ve lived in this county for years, risk their lives for this county for years, done their job,” he said. “Mr. Foreman did it intentionally. Mr. Foreman knew that what he posted on the internet were lies.”
Afroman’s attorney, David Osborne, had a different narrative. Fundamentally, the case was about free speech and musical expression, he told the jurors, offering them a brief history of songwriting and lyrical disagreement. They didn’t have to like what the rapper sang, but he argued that they needed to affirm he had a right to say it.
Osborne pointed to Afroman, wearing the same American flag suit he had worn the day before, and said: “Does this look like a man who thinks that everybody’s going to assume that everything he’s saying is fact?”
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