No decent, normal, thoughtful and sensible human will see the raping of a woman or any gender at all as something to gloss over or even outrightly ignored. But we run the risk of watering down the sensitivity of the matter and the gravitas it carries if we welcome those who spin fictitious and false tales of being raped and allow their spurious narrative to be the solid ground atop which the objectives of the cause are built.
When ordinary and regular people use social media to chronicle their distasteful indulgences and gross exuberance, people tend to ignore or overlook them and see them as creepy characters looking for attention or using unsavoury means to gain a massive following on social media and build a personality that is hard to ignore in a frenzied and validation-driven arena of social media. But when a prominent and renowned public figure engages in such unpalatable and unsettling social media antics it raises eyebrows. These worrying trends and phenomena, involving the resort to dangerous theatrics to seek validation and boost one’s social media presence, have been at the centre of our public discourse in recent weeks.
A popular TikToker, Mirabel, took to the social media platform to narrate her sexual assault experience. She had claimed she was attacked and raped in her apartment at Ikorodu by a man who had previously approached her to get her phone number. The video of her sharing her ordeal went viral like an inferno during harmattan and it was not long before it drew the attention of public figures and relevant authorities. However, as more and more people began to show interest in the matter and probe deep into her claims, doubts and misgivings about the credibility and authenticity of her story intensified.
It was not long before those who were not motivated by an agenda or preconceived notions began to pick holes and inconsistencies in her story, and they started asking pertinent questions. She would later come out to confess that she was not raped or sexually assaulted and that she had fabricated everything and even embellished the story with tears and garnished it with the forced appearance of a distressed and traumatic rape victim to hoodwink people and make the story believable.
After she confessed that she had conjured up the entire rape story, one would have thought the controversy and hysteria that greeted the matter would begin to fade away, but that is not the case it only open a new front of social media battle and war of attrition between those who doubts the authenticity of mirabel story and wanted clarity which led them asking questions and those who had latched onto the mirabel story to reignite their fierce campaign against rape and demand justice for her but who fail to show the grace and character to admit they made poor judgment, they instead doubled down on their initial position and asserted that the confession of wrongdoing by mirabel does not invalidate their hasty position on the matter. One of those who belongs to this category of sexual assault arbiter is popular female afrobeat star, Simisola Kosofe, popularly known as Simi.
Simi was quite vocal in her campaign against rape and that is what is expected of any decent, sensible and reasonable human. But the problem with Simi is that she has this troubling proclivity of turning topical and sensitive social issues into a gender war. After it became obvious that Mirabel’s rape story was fictitious and spurious, Simi made a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, about the plight of women and how society and the gender that should guide and protect them have become the enablers of the unkind, abhorrent and diabolical treatment meted out to them. Matters came to a head when Simi opined that “They need to castrate rapists and burn them.” One netizen then asked her what should be the fate of false accusers of rape to which the singer replied “stfu”.
Her needless condescending reply to the harmless question was the catalyst and motivation for those on the other side of the Mirabel saga to rummage through her X account and exhume her old posts and what they unearth does not make for pleasant reading nor do they do her reputation any good. From a cheeky post of planning to molest a kid at her mother’s daycare to sexualising another kid because, according to her, the 4-year-old boy has a crush on her. It did not stop there, she also sexualized football players’ celebrations. She sexualized award winning American rapper, J Cole, many times and fantasised about having sexual intercourse with him. He also lent her voice to a post about raping, a renowned British actor, Idris Elba.
While some may argue that at the time Simi made those, Twitter was an arena of intemperate, unfiltered, unabashed and unrestrained chronicling of people’s unhinged, idiotic and despicable thoughts and she probably didn’t do or even meant any of the grotesque missives. This assertion may have been given consideration if Simi was a teenager at the time, but she wasn’t a carefree, unstable, wild but innocent teenager, she was already a young adult who could tell her right from her left and was fully aware that are distastefully perversive posts bordered on pedophilia and even when concerned minds warned her that her litany of sensual monologue about babies violated Nigerian child rights law, she was quite dismissive. There is a thin line between a freak and a pervert. Simi crossed that line by a mile.
As her past impertinence and self-indulgence started to overshadow her rape campaign and people began to ask questions about her own past writings, utterances and actions that could comfortably be deemed as boychild molestation, she was forced to issue a statement where she admitted posting the old tweets.
The statement reads “I haven’t been on Twitter today – but someone brought a few of my old tweets to my attention and I can’t not address it.
14 years ago, I was 23, so I was definitely not a child. I’m not here to make excuses because I don’t have anything to make excuses for. What I can’t let anyone do is twist my story to fit false narratives.
In 2012, I lived and helped out at my mom’s daycare while I was hustling my music. I tweeted everything that happened in my life, as we all did at the time. Kids can be mischievous. If a child did something I found funny, I tweeted about it. Kids are cute and lovable. I want to hug, kiss and cuddle them. I tweet about it. Nothing I tweeted was from perversion.
I was not famous, so maybe if I were, I would have understood that anything is open to whatever interpretation including being used falsely by a faceless mob. I’ve never been depraved in my life. You can retweet all the tweets in the world about me loudly crushing on people I admire/d. Or being a cheeky young woman. I wasn’t trying to hide it, because I don’t have anything to hide.
My team has been deleting some of my tweets because of how sensitive they are to my family. To be honest, I did not want to. I have always spoken against rape and sexual assault even before you knew I existed. It’s not a costume I’m wearing, it’s who I am. I’ve never claimed to be perfect. I’ve never claimed to know everything. I said stop raping women. I stand by it.”
While owning up to her past misdeeds and admitting that she indeed sent out those tweets years ago is commendable, her attempt to frame the backlash that has come her way in the wake of the Mirabel rape saga as a reaction to her vociferous campaign against raping woman is disingenuous and a tad disgraceful. No decent, normal, thoughtful and sensible human will see the raping of a woman or any gender at all as something to gloss over or even outrightly ignored. But we run the risk of watering down the sensitivity of the matter and the gravitas it carries if we welcome those who spin fictitious and false tales of being raped and allow their spurious narrative to be the solid ground atop which the objectives of the noble cause are built.
The unearthing and dissemination of Simi’s ignoble past is not because she spoke against rape but because she justified and rationalised false rape claims which effectively defeat the goal and essence of her campaign against rape. To gut the reputation you’ve built for over a decade because of a lack of patience and good judgment is unsettling. And it is pathetic and dangerous for Simi to claim she does not care about false rape accusations even when evidence abounds of how many men have been sent to prison for that. How do you want to talk about Rape and not talk about False Rape accusations?
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