Allegedly, they go to a corner of the club to perform oral sex. Then they go back to his hotel and they have consensual sex. I think that part is pretty much accepted. Everything after that is all about who you choose to believe.VIII I truly believe—and I’m not exercising any hyperbole when I say this—this is the single most impactful, consequential case in rap history. Because the chain of events that happens after November 18 alters the course of rap.
ROB MARRIOTT Unlike, say, Mike Tyson, who had a famous rape case around that same time,IX it was harder to defend Mike Tyson than it was to defend Tupac. Tupac had a track record of being someone who was so pro–Black women and someone who didn’t need to force himself onto women. Having a lot of admirers was part of his persona. It was harder to believe the allegations against him. It was really about trying to respect the woman involved, but there were so many stories behind the scenes that it didn’t seem like the truth had come out. There’s a lot of weirdness where Haitian Jack was in the room, but he wasn’t prosecuted.X There was a lot of whispering about what went down in the hotel room and at Nell’s and all of the salacious details of those couple of nights. So it was really trying to suss what was true and what was not, while also defending Pac’s right to a fair trial.
RICHARD DEVITT I lived in Manhattan for nearly twenty years, ending in 2002. I lived virtually on the same street, West Fifteenth Street, right near Union Square, for that entire time. If you live in Manhattan, you’re called to jury duty quite a lot, because there aren’t that many people who actually live in Manhattan. It’s like 750,000. There are a lot of courts there—federal, state, and local; civil and criminal—and there are grand juries, so you’re constantly being called. So this was one of a number of times that I was called to jury duty.
At that time, I was in my midforties. I was going through my midlife crisis. My musical interests at the time tended much more toward punk rock. I was hanging around with a lot of musicians in the East Village. I was very much into that music scene there. So I wasn’t really much of a hip-hop fan. I was sort of neutral on the subject. I didn’t know about Tupac. I knew who he was. I knew that the police didn’t like him. I knew he was a music star. I wouldn’t have recognized his music if you played it.
A reminder of the way New York State law works: the jurors all had to be from the same county in which the crime occurred. Okay, Manhattan is its own county. It’s New York County. And so everyone on the jury was a Manhattanite.
There were two older women on the jury. One of them, this older Jewish lady, was really non compos mentis. She was really not fit to be a juror. She didn’t remember things. It was November, as I recall, and the weather was turning bad, and there were snowstorms coming and the trial had lasted a lot longer than originally anticipated. She wanted to get out of New York and get to her condo in Florida. That’s all she cared about—“Can we just vote on this now?” She would vote guilty or not guilty depending on the majority. She didn’t care if he was acquitted or not, or on what charge. “Can we just get over this?” She would fall asleep in the middle of the discussions. There was a younger Jewish lady who was a nice lady, who I became somewhat friendly with during the trial, who was sitting right next to her, who turned to me at several points and said, “You know, she’s senile. She doesn’t know what’s going on here.” She said it loud enough for everybody to hear, and the old lady, who had thick glasses on, she wouldn’t even react. She wouldn’t even know the comment was meant about her.
The other older lady was much more of a force to be reckoned with. I remember during the jury selection, boy, she really wanted to be on this jury. You could just tell, you know, that she wanted to give all the right answers. I had a number of conversations with her over the course of the long period, because we were sequestered. She positioned herself once we got into the jury room at the head of the table, this lady, and she really tried to preside over things even though she was not the jury foreman.
She had worked in Manhattan. She lived in an upper-middle-class apartment complex on the East Side. She was retired. She had never been married. She was a devout, extreme, right-wing Roman Catholic. She was very religious, very conservative, no experience with relations with the opposite sex. Her social knowledge seemed to have been frozen in 1943.
Here was her position on the whole thing: This poor, poor girl. He was her ideal. He was her star. He was her guiding light that she looked up to and she respected and she fully expected him to marry her, and this is how he betrayed her. That was her entire theory of the case, and she never let go of that theory. She was the one who kept us in there forever. Had it not been for her, we would have acquitted on all counts. She was the reason we deliberated for so long. She would not back down an inch, she wouldn’t concede a single point.
A younger woman was trying to tell her people do have sex outside of marriage and they even have casual sex without intending to get married. She didn’t buy that. This was too nice of a girl for that kind of thing. She knew there were trashy girls who did trashy things, there always were—that’s how she would frame it; this was not that kind of a girl. You could see how well dressed this girl was, and she worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and she was well presented, and she was very soft-spoken, and she’s not the kind of girl that would have sex unless she was absolutely determined that she was going to be marrying this guy, and that’s what he must have led her to believe. She was starstruck.
So that was her.
There was another guy there who was a pastor. I don’t know if he was Black, Hispanic, or Black-Hispanic. He was my roommate during the sequester. But he and I didn’t really speak all that much because he was a very soft-spoken gentleman. He was probably in his late thirties. A bit heavyset, but not overly so. Very nice man. He had a congregation somewhere uptown, I don’t remember where.
He was very deliberate. I would say very fair-minded. He would ask questions, but they were always pointed questions. What surprised me was he, in the end, whenever we took a vote, he was always voting in Tupac’s favor. When we first sort of introduced ourselves to each other and got to know each other, I thought, This guy, he’s religious, he’s from a conservative Protestant sect. He is probably going to be really against this kind of out-of-wedlock thing, and he’s probably judgmental of hip-hop and thug life and all of that. He may have been all those things, but he stuck to the facts all the time.
There was a little NYU girl. She was a white girl. She was twenty-one; shy, but very sweet. She thought the whole thing was ridiculous—that Tupac was on trial for this. “The girl knew what she was doing, and Tupac didn’t do anything to her, regardless of what happened with the other guys in the room,” she said. The girl never claimed at the time that the manager [Fuller] even touched her. She was like, “What are we trying here?” That was her opinion.
There was a Black woman who was in her late twenties. She vociferously stood up for Tupac. She had many arguments with the older woman [who] sat at the head of the table.
CHARISSE JONES You live the moment now and it’s hard to believe in a way. Like, everything was one way and then it changed. Post-change you’re like, How was it ever like that? That was soooo far before Me Too. It was so far before the reckoning for R. Kelly and these other folks, and the reckoning for R. Kelly took a long time. But at the time, for many, it wasn’t even in your rearview mirror, that you should maybe look at it and condemn what this guy had been accused of doing.
RICHARD DEVITT I have to remark upon the fact that times have changed so much, with the Me Too movement and everything, that today, the event that night would be seen as egregious. We’ve come a long way from when I was a kid, with regard to women and charges of rape. This was the nineties—a long ways from when I was a kid, but we weren’t where we are today.
I was not personally very impressed with Tupac’s attorney. I don’t know about the others in the room because they didn’t really express an opinion, but I can just tell you that I myself wasn’t terribly impressed, and
I thought he could have done a better job. He mainly did the down-and-dirty thing that defense attorneys do in a rape case. It turned out that there was an event that happened at Nell’s down the street from where I lived, on Fourteenth Street. [Jackson] had oral sex with Tupac, and Tupac’s attorney made her go through what happened between them on the dance floor in very graphic detail. He had her go through that step by step.
“He whispered in your ear, ‘Would you like to do this?’ and what did you say?”
“I said, ‘Yes.’ ”
“Then what happened?”
“He put his hand on my shoulder and I knelt down in front of him,” or along those lines.
“And then what happened?”
“He took out his penis.” And her voice got kind of quiet.
“And then what happened?”
“I put my mouth on it.”
“And then what? Did you like it?”
And she said, “Yes.”
If you’ve ever been in a courtroom, you may know that the court reporter has no reason to speak up. In this case, she did. And I think it was a statement on her part. When he asked her, “Did you like it?” and the girl said, “Yes,” the court reporter said, “I’m sorry, Your Honor, I didn’t catch that. Would you have the witness repeat it, please?” And she made her repeat that. The fact that the court reporter did that made quite an impression. It made an impression in the jury room later on, and it made an impression on me at the time.
JUSTIN TINSLEY Obviously, our conversations around rape and sexual assault are night-and-day different compared to what they were in 1993 and 1994. If you go back and read the articles from that time, there were a lot of people, men and women, who sided with Tupac. Even back then, to the people who were really astute and aware of Tupac, he felt like so much more than a rapper. He felt like a ghetto Lazarus to a lot of people. The thought of being remembered as a rapist deeply haunted him. In the Ed Gordon interview,XI he says, “I can’t leave until people actually know that I am not guilty of this.”
Even still, something happened in that hotel room. Something clearly happened. In the [1995 Rikers Island] Vibe interview, he said, “Even though I’m innocent of the charge they gave me, I’m not innocent in terms of the way I was acting.… I don’t know if she’s with these niggas, or if she’s mad at me for not protecting her. But I know I feel ashamed—because I wanted to be accepted and because I didn’t want no harm done to me—I didn’t say nothing.”
So there is this level of responsibility there. Regardless of what anyone believes did or did not happen that night, Tupac said it himself: he didn’t do enough to stop it. At best, he looked the other way. Those aren’t my words. Those aren’t your words. These are his exact words.
When we think about this case, like, we’ve got to look at all entry points, all levels of complexities of it, because it’s not just, “Did he do this?” Maybe he didn’t. But in his own words, he was complicit in what happened. As the guy that made “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” that made “Keep Ya Head Up”—we never know how we’re going to act in situations until we’re put into one. And, at least in terms of that situation, Tupac feared for himself and protected himself over protecting Ayanna Jackson.
ROB MARRIOTT Like everything about Tupac, he had this kind of Gemini nature. There’s always an angel and a devil on either shoulder.
ETHAN BROWN For sure this incident is a result of hanging out with that group of people. Not blaming anyone and saying it’s Jack’s fault or this person’s fault, but it appears that this incident really is like the fallout from this world that he’s in.
JUSTIN TINSLEY Over the course of 1994, Tupac is telling basically anyone who will listen, “I’m innocent. I did not do this.” Whether it’s on Arsenio Hall, whether it’s Ed Gordon, whether it’s outside the courtroom the day before he’s shot at Quad. November eighteenth leads to Quad; he’s calling out all these street dudes in the media, calling out all the hangers-on. He’s like, All these guys were in the room when this incident happened, why am I the only one on trial? His angst with that is understandable. But, again, you’re in that underworld. There are going to be consequences.
ROB MARRIOTT One of the most incredibly articulate star-power moments for him was him coming out of the courtroom and talking to the press very honestly and openly about his case, and why he thinks this happened, what the dynamics were. He showed he really understood how the media works. It’s just such a graceful dance around very difficult subjects. He just asked all these very insightful questions to the media as they were surrounding him coming out of the courtroom, and it was probably that interview that caused the shooting that would happen in Quad Studios later. So he was smart, but not that smart.
JUSTIN TINSLEY If he’s not calling out Jimmy Henchman by name, he’s calling out people that Jimmy Henchman associated with. Tupac’s name was in the streets because he’d pissed some very powerful and dangerous people off.
ETHAN BROWN Jimmy said there was some kind of arrangement with Pac to record verses for Little Shawn.
JUSTIN TINSLEY He gets a call from Jimmy Henchman saying, “I want you to be on my artist Little Shawn’s record.” He got paid like $7,500.
ETHAN BROWN He arranged for Pac to be at Quad at a certain time. Pac was late and Jimmy was so angry—like, How dare this person. He’s getting progressively madder and he’s paging Pac: “Where the fuck are you, man?” I think he starts to fear that Pac is gonna run off with his money. I think it was like $7,000 or $7,500. Pac rolls in hours late with Freddie Moore and a bunch of other folks. If you know Jimmy at all, and I’m sure Pac did, you know this is a person you don’t cross. Even on minor stuff, like showing up late. I don’t mean to, like, make this villainous portrait of him, but he has a very short temper. He’s extremely tough. The slightest disrespect or line-crossing could set him off. So you could see how, if you’re Pac, this might end badly for you.
JUSTIN TINSLEY When he goes to the elevator that night at Quad, even he says he felt weird about it. But he sees Lil’ Cease and them smoking weed on the balcony and that puts him at ease.
TERRENCE “KLEPT” HARDING I’m in the police footage of the lobby that they showed in the news the next day, standing next to Puff.
We were in the studio recording the album because we were in Quad multiple nights going through shit—which, looking back, now knowing more about music, why the fuck y’all gonna waste twelve hours and all the shit in the studio killing our time? We should have had our lyrics ready.
In Quad, there’s a doorway that leads to a ledge where you could look down to the streets, so everybody would go out there. I’m in the control room writing. Big in there, chilling out. Cease went out there to smoke or something. So like ten minutes later, we hear Cease yelling, “Yo, Pac, what up?” He runs out like, “Yo, Pac is downstairs.” We ain’t thinking nothing. We keep writing. I’d be lying if I said the exact amount of minutes that passed, but next thing we know, Cease comes running back into the room, frantic, like, “Yo, niggas got Pac laid down in the lobby.”
We all jump up and run to meet him—me, Big, and Nino Brown go to the elevator. When the elevator comes up, a police officer comes up in uniform and starts looking around, so we don’t know what the fuck happened. When we got down to the first floor all we saw was blood smeared on the walls, blood clots on the floor. Soon as we looked to the right, to the door, mad police came out. So they got us hemmed up in the lobby for twenty minutes. Cops went upstairs. Ambulance people went upstairs.
So now, after a time lapse, the elevator door opens and it’s Pac in a wheelchair. He’s just looking around, of course probably confused. I don’t even know how he got an elevator upstairs. Pac is bandaged up, being pushed out. He looked around, and in those days we used to wear a lot of jewelry. He looked around to see us just chillin’ as they just rolled him out.
ETHAN BROWN When he was photographed being wheeled out of Quad raising the middle finger—I mean, what an incredible moment. And it’s
like he knows that that’s an incredible moment. Having the wits about you, after getting shot, to give the Post the middle finger. He was very aware that the New York Post and, to a lesser extent, the Daily News were incredibly racist publications. There’s the amazing Public Enemy song “A Letter to the New York Post”—“190 years of fucked-up news,” or whatever the Chuck D quote was. A Black man giving this publication the finger is an incredibly powerful thing to do, and it was also very much a statement: “I’m alive.”
TERRENCE “KLEPT” HARDING He was throwing that middle finger up at the media.
ROB MARRIOTT Being a hip-hop journalist at that time was really 70 percent advocacy of the culture—defending it—and the other 30 percent was documenting it. Because the perception of hip-hop was so skewed. The majority of people in the mainstream, they had no real idea what was going on and why things were developing as quickly as they were.
Tupac was like a perfect example of the misunderstood emcee. At The Source, we could see that he was incredibly intelligent and articulate and a truth teller and very courageous, and so on, but for everybody else, all they could see were the court cases. Dan Quayle is saying, “There’s no place in society for him.” So trying to balance the perspective of who this guy is was a priority.
When you see the headlines in the Daily News your first instinct is to be like, This is not the whole story. But also you’re engaging with the rapper. So you also see the underbellies and all of the things that are not quite right—the things that are not developed or not evolved about the culture as well. Being in the Source offices was the most exciting thing and the most depressing thing. You saw all the worst of your heroes and celebrated all of the cultural victories. Tupac did that as well. He disappointed a lot of people along the way. He created situations like the one in Oakland where he got into some scuffle and then a child died in the aftermath.XII
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