The time DaBaby was booed off stage in Florida for hitting a woman
DaBaby is an extremely popular rapper, a chart-topper with multiple Grammy nominations to his name. His fanbase is a loyal one, but even they turned on him after he was caught acting in a troubling way.
In 2020, not long before the Covid-19 pandemic swept through the whole world and locked much of it down, a video footage emerged from a DaBaby gig in Florida. What it revealed was disturbing, and it forced the controversial rapper at its centre to release a statement apologising for his behaviour.
The clip showed a female fan holding her phone up close to DaBaby’s face, the flashlight on and aimed at the rapper’s eye, to which he reacted very badly, lashing out and striking the woman in the face.
Once other people at the scene noticed what had happened, they started booing DaBaby. He later abandoned the gig, leaving the venue without performing; the occasion was a disaster.
DaBaby later took to Instagram to “sincerely apologise” for his actions, arguing that he hadn’t realised the fan he struck had been a woman. “I’m very sorry that there was a female on the other end of that flashlight on their phone,” he posted.
But while he expressed regret about the incident, he did seek to defend himself somewhat, claiming that he “couldn’t see” that this person had been a woman, precisely because she was lighting up his vision with her flashlight.
Addressing the woman directly, DaBaby admitted that “a lot of people” also aimed their lights close to his face, but “they didn’t put it as close as you put it”. His reaction to this was evidently anger, as the video revealed, but he nonetheless said in his post that this level of attention was “what I signed up for”.
He then expressed more frustration about being lit up in this way. He pondered how many of his fans “know how to zoom in”, imploring them to “just zoom in instead of popping me in the eye with the phone”.
All the same, he did “apologise that there was a female on the other end”, claiming that had it been a man, he would have “responded the same exact way”. That seems accurate, in light of his troubling history of allegations of assault against men, too.