The worst part about Freddie Gibbs’ prison experience: “You breathing?”
The mid-2010s were a dark time for Freddie Gibbs.
In June 2016, not long before he was due to take the stage to perform at a gig in the French city of Toulouse, he was arrested. He had been accused of a serious sexual assault, which was alleged to have taken place in Austria the previous year. He was duly extradited to Austria, where he would face trial.
He spent several weeks in jail there before being released on bail and surrendering his passport. He was forced to remain in Austria until September that same year, when, finally, the trial rolled around. If found guilty, he faced up to ten years in jail, but, ultimately, he was acquitted of all charges. He was allowed to leave Europe at last as a free man.
The experience was, naturally, a harrowing one for Gibbs, who has spoken out about it publicly. During one interview with Paper in 2022, he reflected on the racism that he experienced in Austria, while he was imprisoned there. “Going to jail over there was a bad experience,” he said. “All the guards looked down on me.”
The interviewer pushed him to elaborate on his experience of jail in Austria. “The shittiest part was getting commissary,” he said in response, “visits and your family has to take a 13 to 15-hour flight. Maybe they fucked me over but it took me two weeks to get commissary. I was borrowing shaving cream.”
In a situation such as this, where an American citizen has been arrested in a foreign country, one might have expected the US Embassy to get involved to look after one of its own citizens. But, according to Gibbs, the rapper was by and large left to fend for himself. “The American embassy didn’t help me for shit,” he claimed. “They came in there and said, ‘You okay in there? You breathing? Alright, bye.’ Fuck the U.S. embassy. I go to other countries and see they got an American embassy and I’m like, ‘Why?’ If something happened to me, nobody will help me. I’m Black. Even in this country, they won’t do shit.”
Given his level of fame, it again might have seemed reasonable to presume that Gibbs would have been in some way protected during this period of his legal troubles. But that didn’t happen, and, from Gibbs’ own perspective, that’s because being a rapper actively went against him. “Being a rapper is worse than being a n—,” he said. “That’s the new n-word. A n— is cool! It’s cool to white guys. It ain’t cool to be a rapper, though.”
While he was in jail in Austria, Gibbs wrote music which, upon his release, served as the basis of his You Only Live 2wice album, which he released in March 2017. “I pretty much wrote everything in my cell in Austria,” he reflected during a conversation with Complex, promoting the album. “I just wrote things down, wrote ideas, because I didn’t think that I was gonna be able to rap again. You just never know man, so I just wrote a lot of shit. And when I got home I got production and just went in and pieced it together like a seamstress. Everything that I wanted to say I got it all out in this project. And I think that’s why this was so significant for me.”