Who Holds Hip-Hop Accountable? Reckoning with Toxicity, Justice and Cultural Responsibility

Who holds hip-hop accountable? A civil lawsuit accused Jay Z of having raped a 13-year-old girl at an afterparty following the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards. Tony Buzbee, a lawyer who originally filed suit against Sean “Diddy” Combs in October 2024 and added Jay Z’s name (formerly listed as “Celebrity A”) in December 2024, has 20 other lawsuits going against Diddy. Jay Z denies all wrongdoing; Diddy remains imprisoned over separate sex trafficking charges; and the unidentified accuser revealed inconsistencies in her claims during a recent NBC News interview.  This being an op-ed, I personally believe in Jay Z’s innocence. But the allegations raised other questions for me: about intracultural accountability in hip-hop, the toxicity of the culture and how a reckoning in hip-hop would even look.  Two years younger than Diddy and Jay Z, I was the music editor at Vibe the year Diddy was involved in a shooting incident at Club New York with Shyne and Jennifer Lopez (see Hulu’s recent The Honorable Shyne documentary)—the same year Jay Z pled guilty for stabbing record exec Lance “Un” Rivera at Manhattan’s Kit Kat Club. I was there that night at Q-Tip’s album release party.   Hence, I was already active...