Chris Brown? Controversy? Nooooo. Surely not.
Extraordinarily, the R&B singer has gone and riled people up – this time on Instagram.
Posting a video to his page, Brown revealed to his gazillion followers that he had bought his daughter Royalty – don’t get me started – a baby monkey, nappy and all.
The animal, wrapped in a towel and looking very confused, is toyed about with lovingly by Royalty as Brown jokes that it will one day be bigger than her.
He says:
Is this your baby? She’s going to be bigger than you, right. Y’all got the same size head.
Haters of domestic monkeys and folk with a minimal knowledge of animals in general weren’t exactly happy.
One user wrote:
What an idiot! This is animal abuse! Don’t you know that monkeys can get very agressive when they are kept to [sic long in captivity? What an excellent gift for a child this is…
Another fumed:
Not a TOY. A baby marmoset was ripped away from its other. this is a WILD animal that needs a very particular habitat and care.
Brown himself has not commented on the matter. I assume he’s too busy looking after an actual monkey to address the haters.
In a documentary earlier this year the rapper opened up about the night he assaulted then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009.
Speaking in Chris Brown: Welcome to My Life, he said:
She starts going off, she throws the phone ‘I hate you!’, whatever, whatever. She starts hitting me, we’re in a little Lamborghini. You know, she’s fighting me, and I’m like ‘Look, I’m telling you the truth, I swear to God, stop it.’ So then she hits me a couple more times. It doesn’t go from translation to ‘Let’s sit down, I’m telling you the truth.’
So now I’m gonna be mean and be evil. Like I remember she tried to kick me, just like her beating shit.
But then I really hit her. With a closed fist. Like I punched her, and it busted her lip. And when I saw it I was in shock, I was ‘F***, why did I hit her like that?’
So from there she’s spitting blood in my face, it raised me even more. It’s a real fight in the car, and we driving in the street. I’m like ‘Yo, we tripping, what the fuck, what are we doing?’
Brown claims Rihanna then grabbed his crotch while scrambling to get his phone, so he bit her on the arm while he was driving, before pulling into Los Angeles’ Hancock Park.
He added:
…Me? I felt like a fucking monster. A lot of the times, I look back at that picture and I think ‘that’s not me bro, that’s not me’. I hate it to this day, that’s going to haunt me forever.
While the admission of domestic violence is a brave one, and the desire to rehabilitate after committing an atrocious act upon a loved one is admirable, this documentary stinks of a money-making self-aggrandising PR stunt from Chris Brown’s team.
The video of his daughter’s monkey on Instagram on the other hand is just another case of PR gone horribly wrong.
If you are trapped in an abusive relationship or know someone who is suffering at the hands of domestic abuse, you are not alone. Please call the anonymous 24-hour National Domestic Violence Freephone Helpline on: 0808 2000 247.
