[The Sexuality Blog] Why is Nicki Minaj staying silent on her brother’s rape case?

Nicki Minaj

There are few people you’d expect certain kinds of behaviour from. Especially if this person has built a career on the liberation of herself from the expectations and ideals of others, the embrace of her sexuality on her own terms and a hunger to best her male contemporaries. Onika Maraj, otherwise known as Nicki Minaj is certainly a feminist – at least on the surface – in her music and her public persona, but in private, after all the glamour is stripped away, Nicki Minaj doesnt follow through on her principles.

She is in fact the worst kind of rape apologist; the one who says everything right in public and then in the privacy of their homes and families, act in certain ways that outrightly suggest that rape is expected and that perpetrators of rape should go free. Nicki Minaj’s elder brother Jelani Maraj has been in the courts since late 2015, criminally accused of raping an 11-year-old girl, one who was in his care as a step parent and one whom he raped regularly, as many as four times a week. Maraj was exposed when his step daughter and victim’s 8-year-old brother (at the time) stumbled on his sister being raped.

The 8-year-old boy recently testified about what he saw and how it made him feel (heartbreaking stuff). What is even more heartbreaking is this: aside from paying $100,000 in bond (official statements say that Carol Maraj paid for Jelani’s bail using two $5,000 promissory notes and the mortgage on the house Minaj bought for her), she has remained silent on a smear campaign on her brother’s 14-year-old victim, with several rumours from Jelani Maraj’s camp accusing her and her family of trying to threaten her family into delivering 20 million dollars. Incredulous if you ask us.

News was leaked to several media organisations including Pitchfork and TMZ that Nicki Minaj would take the stand to testify about her brother’s marriage with his step wife and his relationship with his step-daughter, the victim of his repeated rapes. Unsurprisingly, Jelani’s team has since refuted the rumours and called them attempts to smear Nicki Minaj’s name and drag her into the case between Jelani and his victim. Never mind that his defense team is trying to present his 14-year-old victim, who was 11 to Jelani’s 34 at the time of her assault, as an adult who is engaging in premeditated and systematic behaviour to exploit Jelani’s affiliation to Minaj and by extension, access her wealth.

We are not asking Nicki Minaj to throw her brother under the bus. On the contrary, she can choose to remain silent about her brother’s complicity, even though the law has proven that yes, his semen was found in her underwear. We are asking that she speak up in defense of this 14-year-old who, even in the sliver of a chance that she initiated the sex between herself and Jelani Maraj, is under the age of consent and such should have had the adult Maraj reject her sexual advances and set her straight.

We must always be as vocal about sexual assault and rape when it is in our own households as we are when it happens to faceless ‘statistics’.

Nicki Minaj hasn’t, and it is very disappointing.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

cool good eh love2 cute confused notgood numb disgusting fail