In August 2022, deputies from the Adams County Sheriff’s Office in Ohio kicked down the front door of Joseph Edgar Foreman, a rapper known as Afroman who made the 2000 hit song “Because I Got High”. The police had a warrant to search for evidence of drug trafficking and kidnapping, but they found nothing.

Nonetheless, police broke down Foreman’s front door with guns drawn, trashed parts of his house, cut his security video cords, took cash from his home, traumatized his kids, and offered him no recompensation, CNN reported. So, to retaliate, the rapper released Lemon Pound Cake, a 2022 album personally mocking all the officers involved.

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One of the album’s songs, “Licc’em Low Lisa,” mocking Deputy Sheriff Lisa Phillips as a transgender lesbian who performed oral sex on all of the other male officers’ wives. The song’s music video showed her chasing women with her gun drawn and having oral sex with women.

In 2023, Phillips and six other officers sued Foreman for defamation, alleging that his album and its associated music videos deliberately invaded their privacy and inflicted emotional distress. In a recent two-day trial in March, Phillips herself cried on the witness stand while court officials played the aforementioned song, whose lyrics state (in part):

Lick ’em Low Lisa
Came to town
She ate all the pu**y
All around

Lisa, Lick ’em Low Lisa
Eatin’ pu**y like
Pizza …

She’s not too ugly
She’s not too fine, but she
Might whoop out somethin’
Somethin’ that’s bigger than mine

Lick ’em Low Lisa
She raided my house
She disconnected my cameras
She went down on my spouse

… When Lick ’em Low Lisa
Joined the Adams County Sheriff Department
Husbands was complaining
Because she was munching on they wife’s carpet

The music video included footage of Phillips’ legal deposition in which she said the song had compelled locals to ask her if she was “pu**y-licking Lisa” and whether she had a penis.

“Obviously, I haven’t had a sex change,” she told lawyers, “I have a child.” She also said that she occasionally had to go home from her job at the police force after people sent her the rap video online.

The video includes a segment in which Foreman apologizes to an actress playing Phillips, saying, “I thought I’d crack some musical jokes, and I didn’t know they hurt you that bad. I’m sorry. I think you’re a nice-looking lady. I didn’t know you was a biological lady. I was just having fun with a bad situation.”

In the video, he then hugs the crying officer, takes her for a chauffeured ride in his car to his bedroom — his bed covered in bedsheets bearing green cannabis leaves — and proceeds to have sex with her. The video ends with the actress playing Phillips wearing a revealing black corset, fishnet stockings, and a garter belt as she and the rapper walk hand-in-hand in public.

Phillips reportedly cried during the trial as lawyers played the entire 13-minute video.

In the end, Foreman successfully defended himself. Wearing a suit, tie, and glasses covered in the stars and stripes of the U.S. flag, he said that his artistic expression is protected under the First Amendment’s free speech rights and that he created the album to pay for the officers’ damage to his home.

“After they run around my house with guns and kick down my door, I got the right to kick a can in my backyard, use my freedom of speech, turn my bad times into a good time,” Foreman said. “Yes, I do, and I think I’m a sport for doing so, because I don’t go to their house, kick down their doors, flip them off on their surveillance cameras, then try to play the victim and sue them.”

Foreman’s lawyer, David Osborne Jr., noted Supreme Court precedents protecting commentary, noting that recognizable satire is protected speech, even if it’s malicious. He also said that a hypothetical reasonable person would not mistake Foreman’s lyrics as factual statements.

In the end, Osborne successfully argued that — whether jurors agreed with the rapper’s views, lyrics, videos, or creative retaliation — the right to criticize police and make bombastic claims is a regular feature of American hip-hop and protest music that would be irrevocably harmed if the police had successfully sued him for defamation.

“I didn’t win. America won,” Foreman said after winning his trial. “America still has freedom of speech. It’s still for the people by the people.”

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