A Shaggy defense is a legal defense strategy in which a person denies an accusation with the simple defense of "it wasn't me", despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The strategy's name is derived from reggae musician Shaggy's 2000 single "It Wasn't Me", which narrates a story of shamelessly denying one's infidelity; it was coined by Slate writer Josh Levin in 2008 to describe the defense tactics used by singer R. Kelly while on trial for child pornography charges.
"It Wasn't Me" by reggae musician Shaggy was released in September 2000 as the first single from his fifth album Hot Shot , eventually reaching number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States and in other countries. [1] The lyrics of the song depict a man asking his friend what to do after his girlfriend catches him having sex with another woman. His friend's advice is to deny everything, despite clear evidence to the contrary, with the phrase "It wasn't me". As the narrator describes all the evidence his girlfriend has against him, from a video recording to witnessing the cheating herself, his friend adamantly repeats "it wasn't me". Ultimately, the narrator says that the advice "makes no sense at all".
On February 3, 2002, a video surfaced showing popular R&B musician R. Kelly statutorily raping, and urinating on an underage girl. The story, which was released by an unknown source, was sent to the Chicago Sun-Times , the newspaper that broke the story on February 8, 2002. [2] This news surfaced on the day Kelly was to perform at the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics. In interviews with WMAQ television of Chicago and MTV News, Kelly said that he was not the man in the video. [3] [4] In June 2002, Kelly was indicted in Chicago on 21 counts of child pornography. That same month, Kelly was apprehended by the Miami Police Department on a Chicago arrest warrant. [5]
The case earned media attention, and Kelly's insistence that he was not the man in the video as his only line of defense earned mockery. As comedian Chris Rock commented on the case during his 2004 stand up special Never Scared , "What the fuck is wrong with R. Kelly? He's got a lot of balls, ok? Talkin' about 'it ain't me'. Got a damn sex tape out, 'it ain't me'. Motherfucker we know what you look like!" [6] When the case went to trial in 2007, Kelly based his defense on denying that it was him in the video, which led Slate writer Josh Levin to coin the term the "Shaggy defense" in reference to the song to describe Kelly's strategy: "I predict that in the decades to come, law schools will teach this as the 'Shaggy defense'. You allege that I was caught on camera, butt naked, banging on the log cabin floor? It wasn't me." [7] Levin repeated the term on NPR. [8] Ultimately, Kelly was found not guilty on those charges. [9]
According to Josh Levin of Slate, "As Kelly's lawyers mentioned multiple times, the alleged victim in this case—now a 23-year-old woman—told a grand jury that it wasn't her. While 15 friends and relatives testified that the girl in question was indeed on the video, neither the alleged victim nor her parents showed up in court to testify for either side." [10] The prosecution witness Lisa Van Allen was easily impeached as a witness due to her clearly sordid history with R. Kelly, others, and even soliciting a bribe from an investigator in the case. One juror told the Chicago Tribune, "At some point we said there was a lack of evidence." [9]
Although the term remains most commonly associated with the R. Kelly trial, it has been subsequently used to describe any case where the defendant simply denies they are the individual who committed the crime in the face of overwhelming evidence. For example, in the 2010 Virginia court case Preston v. Morton, in which an allegation against a driver accused of striking a man with a tractor trailer while he was installing traffic lights was refuted by the defendant claiming that he was not the one driving the truck in question, U.S. District Judge Jackson Kiser specifically cited the alleged driver as using the Shaggy defense in his written judgement. [11] Writing about the case, Josh Levin noted the endurance of the term he coined: "The Shaggy defense, like the jury system and the principle of habeas corpus, is one of the pillars underpinning American jurisprudence." [11]
Additionally in 2010, Chris Hayes accused BP of using the Shaggy defense over their refusal to accept responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. [12]
In 2013, The Atlantic accused the United States Department of Justice of using the Shaggy defense in regards to their refusal to respond to a lawsuit filed against them by the American Civil Liberties Union over the CIA's use of unmanned drones in warfare by claiming that the program was a state secret, even though it had been acknowledged and even defended multiple times by the Obama administration. [13]
In February 2019, Virginia governor Ralph Northam was accused of using the Shaggy defense after photographs from his medical school yearbook page surfaced showing a man in blackface next to a man wearing Ku Klux Klan robes. [14] When the story first came out, Northam stated that he apologized for being in the image. However, a day later, Northam changed his story, claiming that it wasn't him. [15] Multiple commentators, including CNN political analyst April Ryan and Michael Eric Dyson, cited the song in their remarks on his conflicting explanations. [16] [17]
Robert Sylvester Kelly is an American singer, songwriter, and record producer. He is credited with prolific commercial success in R&B, hip hop, and pop music recordings, earning nicknames such as "the King of R&B", "the King of Pop-Soul", and "the Pied Piper of R&B". Kelly's career ended in 2019 following his arrest and subsequent convictions on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges involving sexual abuse of minors, for which he is currently serving a 31-year prison sentence.
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"It Wasn't Me" is the first single from Jamaican-American reggae musician Shaggy's fifth studio album, Hot Shot (2000). The song features vocals from RikRok. The lyrics of the song depict one man asking his friend what to do after his girlfriend caught him cheating on her with "the girl next door". His friend/Shaggy's character's advice is to deny everything, despite clear evidence to the contrary, with the phrase "It wasn't me."
The People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson was a criminal trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court, in which O. J. Simpson, the National Football League (NFL) player and actor, was tried and acquitted for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. The two were stabbed to death outside Brown's condominium in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles on June 12, 1994. The trial spanned eleven months, from November 9, 1994, to October 3, 1995.
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American singer R. Kelly has faced repeated accusations of sexual abuse for incidents dating from 1991 to 2018 and has been the subject of a long-term investigation by the Chicago Sun-Times since August 2000. He has been tried in multiple civil suits and criminal trials, starting in 1996 and culminating in a 2021 conviction for violations of the Mann Act and Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and a 2023 conviction for production of child pornography. Defenders of Kelly maintained that he was merely a "playboy" and a "sex symbol." Judge Ann Donnelly, who presided over Kelly's 2021 trial, summarized Kelly's actions as having "used his fame and organization to lure young people into abusive sexual relationships—a racketeering enterprise that the government alleged spanned about 25 years."