Terry Crews Is Shutting Down Other Celebs Mocking His Sexual Assault

Terry Crews is not here for people to mock his sexual assault

Let’s get one thing straight: People who mock sexual assault are the lowest of the low. They are scum. To take that kind of pain that a person has experienced and make it the butt of a joke is a truly horrific thing to do. Terry Crews, who is already a voice of justice and good in this world, is also standing up to the people who mock sexual assault. Specifically, his own sexual assault.

Actor and comedian D.L. Hughley did an interview with VLAD TV where he said he didn’t believe Crews could have been assaulted because he’s a big, strong man.

“Hey, motherfucker, God gave you muscles so that you can say no and mean it,” Hughley said, laughing.

On Twitter, the Brooklyn Nine-Nine star fired back.

“You told the world “God Gave Me Muscles So I Could Say No,” Crews wrote. “Are you implying I ‘wanted’ to be sexually assaulted?”

When called out by Crews, Hughley continued to blame the actor for his own assault, even when Crews said he did fight back. Not that it matters anyway as sexual assault is never the victim’s fault.

Hughley seemed to question the #MeToo movement on the whole saying in the interview, “Everybody is so into this notion that ‘it happened to me too.’”

Crews, on the other hand, has been an outspoken proponent of the #MeToo movement, including being extremely open about his own assault. He has accused Adam Venit, an agent at WME, of groping his crotch at an industry event in 2016. Crews eventually dropped WME as his agency and filed a lawsuit against Venit. Venit was investigated, but prosecutors ultimately chose not to charge him, as is the case in so, so many sexual assault cases.

There’s such a stigma around sexual assault in general, but especially around sexual assault against men. As we can see from this exchange, men are sometimes not believed, or their accounts are minimized in much the same way as women’s often are. This isn’t even the first time Crews has had to fight back against someone who made his assault into joke fodder.

Earlier this week, Crews and Tariq Nasheed got into a heated Twitter argument about toxic masculinity, and Nasheed eventually came back at Crews with this.

And when Russell Simmons emailed Crews to tell him he should give Venit a pass for literally sexually assaulting him, Crews made his response publicly.

It’s horrifying that anyone should have to do so much work to validate and defend his own sexual assault. But unfortunately, that’s the reality that so many victims face, whether they’re male or female. Crews’ ability to calmly defend himself is truly inspiring, and he’s a strong and valuable ally to all victims of all genders.