Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - hide your kids, hide your wife pt. 1

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

This week, it's Antoine and Kelly Dodson's sixteenth minute — Jamie interviews Antoine about the 'bed intruder' saga of 2010. Read "The Forgotten Kelly Dodson": The Forgotten Kelly Dodson Follow Antoine Dodson here: https://www.tiktok.com/@antoinedodson34See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha.

This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your Podcasts.

It's Black Business Month, and Money and Wealth Podcast with John Hope Bryant is tapping in. I'm breaking down how to build wealth, create opportunities, and move from surviving to thriving. It's time to talk about ownership, equity, and everything in between. Black and brown communities have historically been last in life. Let me just say this. AI is moving faster than civil rights legislation ever did.

Listen to Money and Wealth from the Black Effect Podcast Network, on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. CoolZone Media. My name is Jamie Loftus, and I am still on the internet. If I wasn't, I'm sure my skin would look a lot better. Welcome to 16th minute. I'm not so bad when you turn up the lights going. I can't be perfect all in a time to make me a star.

Let's take it too far That can't be one more more Let me see it! Let's see it! Six minutes of fame Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute of face One more minute at face

If you're not so bad when you're sitting on the bad thing, and probably social media. And I know that's supposed to be a bad thing. But like many, but like many people who are 30, Yeah, boo, elderly on the internet. I cannot log out. And I know that's a bad thing. And I know I'm supposed to go and touch grass. But you know who tells you to go touch grass? People on the internet.

And I just feel like they're not telling me that from the grass. 16th minute is the podcast where I provide a thorough 16th minute of fame to someone who became famous online for a fleeting moment. Why? Because I want to understand what makes a character of the day, because I think that's a more complicated question than we give it credit for. This show is about characters of the day because I am not too good for social media. If I was going to get off of social media, I would have done it a long time ago by now. So gather around and let's learn about the internet. My family couldn't afford a desktop until I was in the second grade, so I have some memories before being online, the most impactful of which was being kissed on. the beach by a kid who, thankfully, was not my biological cousin, but I did call him my cousin, so I couldn't be sure of that at the time. Anyways, here's my operating theory. I don't believe

the technology is making human beings worse, like a lot of headlines suggest. Human behavior and instincts haven't changed much, but the tools that we enact those instincts with have cranked up our ability to react with impact, positively or negatively, way up, not to mention the speed that we can react. Late 20th century tabloids would really languish in reading their subjects to filth for weeks on end, and that's a far rarer experience today. Fifty years ago, it would be uniquely painful for someone who lives 5,000 miles away from you to ruin your day, career, life, but that is no longer true. And 50 years ago, you wouldn't have the instinct to do the same to someone else. People are just not built for it, but the people who live to tell the tale are very much worth talking

to. I want this show to be a place that encourages you to see these people, the characters of the day, as people. And the rest I'll leave to you. Some episodes I'll be interviewing the characters of the day themselves. Some I'll be talking to the people who made them characters of the day. And others, I'll be zooming out a little to take a look at why the algorithm served us this person during this cultural moment and what that might mean. I've been making stuff since high school, mostly online. And if there's anything I've learned in that time, it's that everything, including what you're listening to right now, is a piece of future lost media. So enjoy it or hate it while it exists. And with that, let's get into our first character.

First, a little scene setting. Musical transition. Ooh, nice. Production. Come with me, if you will, to the year 2010. Black Swan, Shutter Island. Get him to the Greek, a movie that that 15 years on has an all-sex criminal cast. Twilight Mania has reached a fever pitch, but we're still a year from my mom asking me if I've heard of 50 Shades of Gray waving around her soggy library book. Like a G6 is playing at every school dance,

and I lose my virginity this August, which was actually a really big deal to my friend group at the time. Thank you so much. 2010. We didn't know what a filthy, debauched decade we tapped into. social media was becoming normal at this time, not just for young people, but for everyone. 2010 was the year my parents got on Facebook, reconnecting with high school sweethearts,

beginning strange emotional affairs. Facebook had surpassed MySpace as the most popular social network on the planet back in 2008, and absolutely dominated, while smaller networks like Twitter, YouTube, and a then-brand-spanking new app named Instagram, steadily grew in popularity. This character's journey, or should I say these characters' journeys, started on YouTube and Reddit, but they wouldn't have become the cultural phenomenon that they did without every single one of those platforms working together. You can rarely attribute a person's 15-minute ascent to one social media platform, especially in the days of the early internet. If you stick in one social media corner, that tends to be where you exist forever. July 28, 2010, in the

Lincoln Park projects of Huntsville, Alabama. Elsewhere, an Air Force plane crashes in Alaska and bullfighting is banned in Catalonia. In Lincoln Park, a news team from local station Waf 48 goes to speak to a woman who just reported a man breaking into her home and attempting to rape her. The newscaster interviews her and her brother, who was at the scene of the crime and tried to apprehend the man, but the rapist got away. Here's part of the clip. I was attacked by some idiot from out here in the projects. Dodson says her attacker used a garbage can to climb onto the unit's ledge, opened the upstairs window, and then he got in bed with her. He tried to write me. He tried to pull my clothes off. Dodson struggled with her attacker, knocking over items in her

bedroom. Antoine Dodson heard his sister scream and ran to help. Well, obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park. Well, wait, wait, let's stop the clip because, yes, this clip sets a record for streams on WAF 48's video site, around 200,000 views at the time, and it first started to gain traction when it got reposted to the R-slash funny page on Reddit. So this is the age of the upvote, and 93% of Reddit users seem to agree that the video clip was funny. Later that same day, someone reposted the news clip to YouTube. Remember, this was before most local news channels thought about having their own YouTube pages, But it's two days later, when a YouTube channel run by the Gregory brothers, three biological brothers and a fourth member, Sarah, who's now married to one of the brothers, whose channel was and is called Shmo Yoho, posted an auto-tuned remix of this broadcast that one of the most infamous moments in internet history began.

Well, obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park. He's clamming in your windows. He's nagging your people are trying to rape. The Dodson siblings, had your 16th minute starts now. This was a huge story, not just because of the clip, but because of how deceptively complicated the subject matter of the clip was. The discussions around Bed Intruder contained issues of gender violence, race, class, queerness, and just the general lawlessness of the early internet. It's a fucking mire, and it's one I was really interested in. And while I think the internet elected the main character of this story as Antoine Dodson, the brother, it's important to note that this story was always about more than one person. First and foremost, Kelly Dodson, who was assaulted, and then her brother Antoine Dodson,

who came to her aid. Internet history doesn't really regard it that way, and I'm going to take a look at Y in a bit, but it's hard to overstate what a gigantic deal this was in the summer of 2010. At the time of this recording, the Gregory Brothers clip, which is called Bet Intruder's song, all caps, three exclamation points, mind you, has 155 million views on YouTube, and the news clip, which was re-uploaded two years later, clocks in at over 84 million views. As I record this in 2024, it's very possible to become an internet character of the day without being cross-pollinated into every corner of the internet.

There are stories that are thoroughly relegated to one platform. Some TikTok scandals never cross over into where the old folks are hanging out, and earth-shattering conflicts from these still active Facebook users in the boomer contingency are unlikely to migrate anywhere else. Things weren't like this in 2010, and the Y is a little complicated. The BBC predicted that there would be 2 billion people using the internet by the end of 2010. In 2024, that number has ballooned to nearly 5.5. billion current internet users. The tools for viral success are wildly different. Facebook and Tumblr

were dominant back then, where TikTok creates today's internet titans with a million fallen social media networks in between. And the way that stories, clips, and people go viral also works very differently now. As we're going to explore in this show time and time again, the front half of the 2010s were, for better or worse, driven by organic engagement between people. And in the last 10 years, we've seen the world online increasingly shaped by algorithms that show us what they think they can profit from. Sales, sure, engagement, yes, and your attention and emotional response from what the algorithm serves up. I know you don't need me to tell you this. We've all watched that Courtney Netflix documentary. It's an attention economy. Let's keep moving. I say it because in

2010, a lot of this stuff was still pretty uncharted, particularly with how fast these media cycles tend to go. The Gregory Brothers had been posting to YouTube for about a year when they first saw Antoine Dodson, after the WAF 48 clip was re-uploaded from the news station's website to YouTube. The brothers claimed to fame at the time were viral news clips expertly remixed into songs. The series was originally called Autotune the News and was later changed to Songify This. And they still do it today. The most recent Gregory Brothers video is a songified clip from the recent Amazon Prime movie Ricky Stenickey about Dix? I didn't finish it. At this time, the Gregory Brothers had had one previous significant success on YouTube, another remix of a

famous viral video of the day. You might remember this one. It was of a very enthusiastic man named Paul Yosemite Bear Vazquez reacting to a double rainbow. The Gregory Brothers remix sounded like this. Whoa, that's a full rainbow all the way. So at the time Bet Intruder dropped, the group's success wasn't unprecedented. Bed Intruder was their second big success in less than a year. And unlike a lot of social media stars, the Gregory brothers had the talent and consistency to remain successful and adapt into today.

They were also behind a very successful remix of a main character from 2022, one of my favorites, Corn Kid, who originally appeared on the online series Recess Therapy. Just talking about corn. For me, I really like cone. What do you like about corn? It's cold. A big, good, good nuts. Good hands a juice.

I too love corn kid. So, the Gregory Brothers have remained very attuned to who makes a viable internet character, but Bed Intruder made the brothers and Antoine Dodson very, very famous. The first Bet Intruder remix video did huge numbers. It actually ended up being the most streamed YouTube video of 2010, closely followed by a Kesha parody and an annoying orange video just to remind you of the era we're in. After that, the Gregory Brothers released a full three and a half minute version of the song that was for sale on iTunes. This was when iTunes, Apple's Papersong platform, was still a pretty viable business model.

Still far less lucrative than physical media, which remained a major discussion at this time. But hey, musicians are doing even worse with Spotify residuals today. And if music distribution online hadn't become this popular, Bet Intruder couldn't have broken into the mainstream in the way it did. The full song was hugely popular on iTunes and even broke into the Billboard Hot 100, reaching number three on the iTunes R&B charts, number 15 on the pop charts, and number 25 overall. So the Gregory brothers are talented composers,

and they're making videos about videos using the original subjects' likeness and voice before there were any common practices online about that. So my knee-jerk fear was that Antoine Dodson, who spoke to the media for free about fending off a man who attempted to rape his sister Kelly, never saw a dime for the huge viral success that was bed intruder. But that's not true. The Gregory Brothers said in an interview with Wired at the time, and Antoine Dotson confirmed to me that the iTunes revenue was split between the brothers and Antoine 50-50. Michael Gregory explains their reasoning to Wired all the way back in 2010. We're really breaking unintentional singing ground, so we're trying to set precedence by making

it so that Antoine or whoever that artist might be in the future has a stake not only as an artist, but as a co-author of the song. It's like you said. He wrote the lyrics. He's the one to put it out there. What we are doing on iTunes and on any other sales, we are splitting the revenue after it gets through Apple down the middle. And that also applies if we ever licensed the song for TV or a movie. Whatever happens to the song, he has a 50% writing credit. And we have the same agreement with Paul Vasquez, co-writer of the Double Rainbow song. According to Dodson, the Gregory brothers tend to have such a good relationship with their viral subjects because of this financial arrangement. And that was a subject of discussion online at the time.

The most recent scandal about an internet viral figure never seeing a dime from a heavily monetized YouTube upload was the singer Susan Boyle. And this prompted tech writers in the early 2010s to ask creators if the people they were pulling from actually got any financial kickback. This is a conversation that continues today, particularly in an algorithmically fueled ecosystem that still pushes white creators to fame over anyone else. And the Gregory brothers are talented, but given that they're white people in Brooklyn, remixing a newsbrewery, broadcast about an attempted rape on a black woman in a poor area of Georgia and monetizing it, that was a question that needed to be looked at more closely. And that's not to say there wasn't any criticism of the way that blackness, poverty, and sexual assault were all being trivialized by turning it into a song. Michael Gregory defended this to Billboard in 2010, saying,

It's taking a terrible situation and making at least something positive out of it. But the way the Dotsons were presented to the public by the media upset others, because of the lack of control they had on how they were portrayed until they were already famous. The news broadcast was through a white lens, and the parody was through a white lens. And some critics call that out. Baratune de Thurston of The Onion talked to NPR about how it sat poorly with him on All Tech Considered at the time, saying, as the remix took off, I became increasingly uncomfortable with its separation from the underlying situation. A woman was sexually assaulted, and her brother was rightfully upset. People online seemed to be laughing at him and not

with him, because he wasn't laughing, as Dodson fulfilled multiple stereotypes in one short news segment. But Thurston notes, Antoine Dodson seemed to have a vested interest in bending the media narrative to his and his family's favor, and not just letting the internet mill roll over him. Thurston continued. The creativity unleashed has been amazing, and what mitigates my fears of people minimizing the gravity of the situation is how Antoine himself has responded and taken charge of his own meme. This is where I will ask for the first and not the last time, where's Kelly? Kelly Dodson is all but absent in the Bed Intruder remix. Both the newscast and the song give major precedence to her brother Antoine.

But we'll get back to that point. What you need to know is that once Bet Intruder was posted, it was fucking over. Marching bands were covering this song. Haley Williams from Paramore and guys from punk bands I've never heard of were covering this song. Well, obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park. It's running in your windows. It's snatching your people up trying to rape it so you need to hide your kid. Hide your wife. Hide your kids. Hide your wife. Hide your wife. And hide your husband. And yes, mocked the Dodson's vocal delivery.

It went on and on. This story kept going and kept mutating. The Gregory brothers were on the Oscars that year, songifying the biggest teen movies of 2010. Also, this was the year that Anne Hathaway and James Franco hosted the Oscars together for some reason. I kind of memory-hulled that, so sorry if I reminded you that happened. It was weird.

But Antoine Dodson seizes on this sudden burst of fame as well. He made a number of appearances during this stretch of time, but the most viral were ones where he leaned directly into the meme, notably performing the auto-tune version at the BET Hip Hop Awards in 2010, right alongside Michael Gregory. Here's a clip. Just then, a crime was committed on a 500 block of Webster Drive. We have an eyewitness on the scene now. Well, he's climbing in your windows, he's snatching your people up trying to rape us, so y'all need to hide your kids, hide your wife. Antoine Dotson and Michael Gregory, real talk, for real. I know that was messed up, but they was able to buy their mama a house and get him out the projects with that song right there. I don't know how long they're going to live there. So go run and tell that homeboy. That's host Mike Epps at the end, referencing the fact that just three months after

Bet Intruder went viral, the Dodsins were able to move out of the projects with the money not just from the song, but merch that Antoine sold, featuring his image with slogans from the clip, we can find you, we've got your t-shirt, etc. And this goal of monetizing this moment came into focus for Antoine within days of the bet intruder's songs release. Antoine Dodson was going to school for business and was very shrewd about controlling the narrative to his family's benefit from very early on. Less than a week later, he'd set up a website called Antoine's World, where he posted updates about the Gregory Brothers songs, his merch, and the appearances and fundraisers he was holding. He told fans directly that money

from these endeavors would be going to his family and to a juvenile diabetes charity. Unlike a lot of the viral stars we'll be covering on this show, Antoine Dodson had staying. power, partially because he had an interest in staying in the spotlight. He would continue to appear in media and TV and film for years after this, including a lot of speculation about his sexuality that went through a number of unnecessary press cycles between 2010 and 2018. Here's something. In 2014, and get ready for a wild one, there was a pay-per-view celebrity boxing match between Antoine and quote-unquote the intruder. It gets a, It's weirder. This match was hosted by Cato Kalin, who was like the famous witness who testified

at the OJ Simpson trial in the 90s. It's a fucking madlib of an event. The man who called himself the intruder, a man named Rashad Cooper, gave an interview to A.L.com implying that Kelly Dodson had been lying and made the entire rape attempt up. Here's that quote. She tried to do something I wasn't down for yet. All of a sudden, she got mad and bipolar and started throwing stuff trying to fight me. So I won't lie, I did hop out of that window. A mad woman, you don't play with him. Antoine won the boxing match and his son was born two days later. Kelly Dodson made no comment on the fight and did not confirm that that was in fact the man who had attempted to rape her four years earlier. The last time the siblings appeared together in public was in 2021 on

Judge Jerry Springer, one of those fake court shows before Jerry Springer died, where Antoine was suing Kelly for $750 over a personal loan. From what I could find, this was the first time Kelly had made an appearance publicly in years. Here's a clip. You're reasonably well-known. Tell me your story, Antoine. Well, obviously, I need everybody to have their kids, half their wife, and had their husbands, too, because I'm showing everybody who owe me some money.

Just plain and simple. I'm Antoine Dosset, and I did the Had Your Kids video back in 2010. I made him famous. That's why he's well-known. Oh, my God. You made him famous? Yes. No, she did not.

Make me famous, that's why you're well-known. Your Honor, I am so sick of tired of my family saying that. They say that all the time. Every time we get into an argument when it's about money or finances is, oh, I made you famous, it was me, I'm the victim, and I'm just so tired of carrying this victim title. I am the victim. The whole world, no, I'm the reason you're famous.

Do we need to play the video clip? So as the years passed, most of the public seemed to forget what Kelly is talking about here in 2021, the tremendous. incident that prompted everything, all the way back in 2010. So a decade on, Kelly's trauma is remembered less and less, and the fixation on Antoine Dotson's clip on WAF 48 is what's stuck in the collective memory. And while the Gregory brothers would continue to have other successes off of Autotune the News, they would often return to the well of Antoine when they would get work outside of YouTube. And there's no better example of that than in early 2015 when the band

composed the theme song to the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt for Netflix, with not just the same cadence of the bed intruder song, but basically the same setup. So the clip is of a neighbor of the series protagonist, Kimmy, who is a survivor of an abusive underground cult run by John Hamm. But the theme itself is an auto-tune the news clip. This neighbor is a black man named Walter Bankston who lives in a trailer unknowingly beside this underground bunker. And this character tells a local newscaster the following. Mr. Bankston? Oh, yeah.

What had happened was, I was out for I caught about time with my grandson when out of nowhere 40 hundred police vehicle came walking. So this moment

in internet history continued to be really lucrative, all while the real story was slowly erased. And that erasure is not the fault of either Dodson's sibling.

The real detailed story of what happened that day in 2010 was always available. Antoine Dodson spoke in both his sister Kelly and his community's defense extensively around the same time period that the BET Hip Hop Awards and Tosh Point O were happening. So if I were to use my big old brain to take a guess here, these interviews were quickly forgotten because they don't lean into the image of the Dodson's that WAF 48 projected in that video. And including details about the attempted rape of Kelly Dodson would likely have made the gleeful enjoyment of this song seem pretty

dismissive, but the interviews were always there. Here's Antoine on NPR the week the video went viral. What do we need to do as people to keep our community safe? You know what I'm saying? Like, because nobody's talking about in that. I mean, the world knows, but here locally in Huntsville, it's like, okay, it's a joke. Everybody's taking it to be a joke. It's funny to them. You know what I'm saying? I'm making their city look bad. I'm making their community look bad. And when we come back, I got to speak with Kevin Antoine Dodson. Sometimes it's hard to remember, but... Going through something like that is a traumatic experience, but it's also not the end of their life.

That was my dad, reminding me and so many others who need to hear it, that our trauma is not our shame to carry, and that we have big, bold, and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us. I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leah Trotate. On my new podcast, The Unwanted Sorority, we weighed through transformation to peel back healing and reveal what it actually looks like, and sounds like, in real time. Each week, I sit down with people who live through harm, carried silence, and are now reshaping the systems that failed us. We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls, mothering as resistance, and the tools we use for healing.

The Unwanted Sorority is a safe space, not a quiet space. So let's walk in. We're moving towards liberation together. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced.

He said, you are a number of New York State. number and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't

know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way

in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of family secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to 16th Minute. I am a white woman with brown hair. So when I reached out to Antoine Dodson, I was not sure what to expect. And honestly, I most wanted to speak to Kelly Dodson, who had never been centered in a story about her reporting and attempted assault. But Kelly has historically resisted the limelight, which is an active agency in itself. There's no way to contact her online at present. Antoine, however, did reply, and we caught up not just about his history as an internet celebrity, but about his

whole life. So just so you're aware, this interview was over two hours long, so it's been edited for length and clarity. And I'll do my best to fill you in. on what Antoine and I discussed between clips. On that note, I'm also going to place a trigger warning here for child sex abuse as well. Here's some of our talk. Hey, I'm Antoine Dyson. I became famous from the local interview that I did here in Huntsville, where my sister was attacked and the chudel came into her home. Yeah, and that's how the fans know me.

What is life like for you right now? You're back in Huntsville for now. Here it's pretty, you know, this to South, it's pretty laid back. You know, they got the country vibe, the soul cooking, you know what I'm saying? There's no paparazzi here. It's not a lot of work for entertainment here. So it's pretty laid back. Is most of your family still in Huntsville as well?

No, most of my family is still in Chicago. I'm originally from Chicago, and I moved to Huntsville in 2004. and most of my family stayed back and I'm the oldest of nine kids five of them and myself we moved here in Huntsville with our mom as far as back I can remember I was probably about five or six

around that age where my mother's mother she was getting sick and she had diabetes which gave her gangrene so she had to get her leg amputated so of course with that she had to go into a nursing home and so my mama was left

out there to fend for herself with two kids. So when my grandmother went to the nurse at home, I remember my mama packing me and my sister up a bag. And I remember her putting us on the CTA public transportation in Chicago. And she sat down with us and had this long, like, when you get to this house, don't touch nothing, don't say nothing, you stay close to me, don't break nothing, don't ask for nothing. You know how parents do before they tell you,

because this is where we're going to be staying. So you don't want to You just don't want to do a lot So she gave us this whole list of things Of not to do And so when I got to the house You know how you get this Erie feeling about something?

Yeah Like I always called it the candy cane house Because it was red and white And it was our big mama And another part of our family And I just remember It being real eerie And I walked into the backyard

Where all the family It was that outside. It was drinking and smoking, loud, a whole bunch of folks out there, clowning and stuff. So, you know, me being, I think I was five. But me... Oh, you're a little. Okay. I was little, because this is the beginning of all that trauma. Once he, his mother, and Kelly, moved into this pretty large communal family situation in Chicago. Kevin, that's what I'm going to call him because that's what he usually goes by. Antoine is his middle name. Kevin was sexually abused by his uncle repeatedly.

And like many survivors of child sexual abuse, he was afraid and confused and did not report what was happening to his mom. He told me that this abuse continued for years. But, yeah, this happened from five or six years old all the way up until I was 14 when I ran away. I tried to commit suicide behind it and everything. It was because my grandmother, the big mama of the family was mother for the state of Illinois. When she had kids coming in and out. Kids will come in and out of the house, different kids. She didn't want them.

She had sent them back there, send her a new set of kids, you know, like that type of house, basically a foster home. Okay. So, yeah, it was bad. It was really bad. A lot of things happened. Yeah, I tried to commit suicide. The same thing happened to my sister.

But at the time, I didn't know. So I didn't know with Kelly Cee. I didn't know that that was happening to her until we got older. We started drinking and conversations, people bringing up old wounds. Right. And then I found out. Kevin told me that his childhood was marked by abuse and attempts to run away, as well as struggling to navigate his own personal sexuality,

and that this led to depression and hospitalization. I found one of my uncle's pills. I took the whole bottle in the bathroom. I locked the door, and that's why I passed out of it. And so I woke up to them knocking up, my mother, knocking on the door like, Kevin, are you okay in there? Like, because my first name is Kevin. Yeah. So she was like, are you okay in there?

Are you okay in there? So I'm waking up and I'm like, damn, I'm busy. My stomach hurt, my head hurt. I'm like, and so I opened the door, I said, Mom, I took all these pills. And so my mama just immediately started freaking out. She was like, oh my God, like, why would you do that? like, no, you got to go to the hospital. And so I can tell that I'm getting real dizzy.

So everybody was like, take them outside on the front porch. He needs to get smear, which was the worst thing that they could have done. Because soon as that air hit me, I passed out again. And I woke up in an ambulance. I get to a hospital. Actually, it was a hospital that was born in, Roseland Community Hospital. So some days had went by, and it was like, Mr. Dotson, we're going to have to release you and transfer you to another hospital because we've done all we can here for you.

So I'm like, damn, this is weird, not thinking that they're sending me to a fucking psych ward. Oh, okay. I mean, again, you're a kid. Like, how are you supposed to know? Right. So I'm thinking I'm getting ready to be released into the wonderful land of eyes. But I ended up going to the cycle of it, which is closed now, but it's called Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. And so I'm there.

And so I was there for three days. I guess they was doing like observation and watching me recover and stuff. So like after three days, they said, well, they came in. The nurse said, well, Mr. Dyson, you're being released. So I'm thinking I'm being released to go home. And so they were saying. Like, we're waiting on your, we notified your mother and we're waiting on her to come in. So when my mama came in, they didn't tell her that they wanted her to sign a release to put, to commit me.

And so my mama said, oh, I'm not doing that. I'm not committing my son. And so the nurse said, man, we just actually, we was doing it out of courtesy, but we really don't need your permission because his ass is going. Really? Yeah, they didn't need my consent. I guess the fact that I try to commit suicide and DA back there it's called DCFS, Department of Children and Family Services. Oh, okay. And so, yeah, so they didn't need her permission.

So they took me to a mental institution where they really feel more crazy. You know what I'm saying? Like, I told them what happened. I explained to them like, hey, I only did this shit because I hurt somebody and I'm being hurt in the same way. and it's from my family but nobody believed me and the hospital did not believe me so much so that like

when I would act out you know how we kids are when you don't believe a kid they begin to act out so I began to act down and stuff and they would put me a straight jacket shoot me in my ass so I couldn't move

like it was it was a I'm telling you this shit is very traumatic it just it was really bad but eventually after being that for like two or three months. I realized in the last month, I told myself, now I got to fake

it until I make it because me clowning here, fighting everybody is not, they're going to keep me here. So I learned that, okay, I'm going to be more calm. As soon as I get out of here and I get to my mama house, I'm running away. I had created this whole plan in my head. Once he was released, Kevin did soon run away from the house, only to be returned by the police after not being able to connect with his godmother. After this, he says that the abuse from his uncle escalated and that he was also trafficked two friends of his uncle as a teenager. This was in addition to his sometimes needing to buy his own food when the matriarch of the house wouldn't let him and Kelly eat regular meals. And it's here where Antoine comes into the mix. Yes. So in my mind,

all is going on with my uncles, this is how I'm providing for myself to, eat. So when you're in a situation like that, you become very creative. You start creating, for one, I had to create a hustle. I had to make sure that I, when my grandmother and them said that we couldn't eat, I had to find a way to eat. So me and my, because they did my cousins like that. It was a lot of us cousins. So what we would do is like, we had this 24-hour grocery store. So what we would do, we were fed up shop in the basement and we would say, hey, we going to send you to go and get the snacks and the stuff and we're going to be on a lookout. So that's how we used to do it.

We all used to take turns, not to mention like when I wanted to, I created Antoine in my head, like when my uncle used to get on top of me and stuff, I would go places in my mind. Because my family called me Kevin, but I knew that Kevin came with a lot of pain, a lot of trauma. He was very angry, would snap off in a heartbeat. So I had to create a personality outside of that that brought me hope and, you know, joy and peace. Like, and so I created this, this Antoine Dyson character. And Antoine Dyson, he was fun. He was funny.

He made everybody laugh. You know, I had to create. this person to get out of this darkness. And this is why people know me today as Antoine Dyson. He still lives in me. And everybody say like, oh, Antoine, you're so funny and stuff like that. You had to create this person out of pain. I didn't create this person because I loved him.

You know what I'm saying? I didn't create this person to be a content creator. I created this person to escape reality. I thought Antoine was a celebrity. I thought that even from a kid, like, I would walk down the street and have my fake bodyguards behind me. You know, I would do my hair, like I do my own hair. I just really created this person to be this funny, comical person.

Right. So finally, Kevin ran away to live with his godmother for a few years to escape this cycle of abuse. And the first person he told that he was leaving for good was his younger sister, Kelly. We just got mistreated a lot. They treated us so bad, and it got to the point where I had talked to Kelly when I was 14. And I said, Kelly, I can't do this no more.

I say, Kelly, I can't do this no more. I'm tired of taking care of kids. I'm tired of going through this shit with this house. I'm tired of having to go still to eat. I'm so tired of everything. And I just up and left, up and left, and I never look back. And around his 18th birthday, a family member reached out to Kevin, Kelly, their mother, and their siblings, and suggested a move to Huntsville, Alabama, where she lived. Because my mother, when we was in Chicago, my mom used to go to school for hair.

And so they didn't want to be bothered with me and my sister. So at the school, they would make me and my sister walk to my mother's hair salon. And that's how we learned how to do hair. Yeah, so from 18 to 24 in Huntsville, that's what I was doing. I was doing hair. I was fried down, laying head to the side. Like, I was making money doing that for everybody. And so, and I was in college for cosmetology and business and management at Virginia College in Huntsville.

And then, it happened. The day before the assault in 2010, Kevin and Kelly had gotten into a petty sibling argument, which led to Kelly punching Kevin. and him leaving the house in annoyance. The whole family had just bought a bunch of frozen meat that was in Kelly's freezer, and so the story really begins when Kevin returns for his meat the next day.

And so the next day, I'm laying on my friend couch, and I'm like, damn, I forgot I got some steaks over there. So I'll wait back over to Kelly House. I walked right in the house. I didn't say shit to nobody. I just walked in her kitchen. And, you know, she had those cheap dollar store frying pads that burned in a heartbeat.

Yeah. So I'm cooking the steaks on her stove in her kitchen. And the gillet is burning. It's smoking the house out. So I put the window in the kitchen. I cracked the window so it can ventilate the smoke. Now I got my hair just like how this is. So I'm taking my hair down.

And Kelly's like, what the hell are you doing? my house and said, I said, girl, that was yesterday news. I'm over that shit. You I got to apologize. Girl, fuck you. Let me take my head down and eat my damn steak. So I'll take my head down as to how the red bandana came about because my hair, I had just took my head down. Okay. So I fell asleep on Kelly couch. I fell asleep on Kelly couch. And I heard, I was talking to my auntie in Florida. And we was on Facebook. I had made some crazy-ass post that we talked of shit. And she's like, you ain't. no celebrity. So I'm like, baby, you know I'm a celebrity.

My bodyguards, they don't play that shit about me. They're going to come and get you. They're going to find you in Florida. This is a conversation that's happened hours before the attack. I remember this was like one, one o'clock in the morning. Okay. But as I'm laying down, I keep laying the phone on my chest. And when the phone vibrated on my chest, I'll lift it up and I text on Auntie. Well, I guess I fell into a deep sleep. And I started hearing this screaming and hollering in my sleep. And I'm like, what the hell? So I opened my eyes and the screens is still continuing.

So I'm like, what the fuck? It's pitch dark. The only thing that's going is the TV. And, you know, back in those days, we had the DVD player. And, you know, when you don't play a DVD after so long, you know how TikTok logo bounced on the screen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. deep side did, which gave a little light in the room.

Okay. So I jumped up immediately. I'm hearing her scream and I'm seeing my other two sisters and my niece and my mother in the hallway. They out, they freaking out so bad. I'm talking about it was, I was the only male in the house. It was so bad. So I bust open the door and I seen a silhouette because the streetlight had. shined in her window.

Yeah. And so you can see the silhouette. I could see her silhouette on the ground. And I can see the silhouette of a man on top of her looking like he had his hands around her neck. Yeah. At that time, I kept really long, I keep long fingernails. I'm regrowing them now. So I just automatically took all my nails.

And I dug them in his shoulder and I snatched them and pulled them off and swank him into the hallway, and that's when he did this little basketball move and went under my arm and ran in the kitchen. Remind you, we're on the second floor. Yeah. So I'm not thinking he is jumping out of a window.

I'm thinking he is going to go get a weapon. We all get ready to die today. So I go in the kitchen. I'm like, y'all, go in the room. Go in the room. Lock the doors. Call the police. So I'm getting ready to go into the kitchen.

But I realized that my other sister has been trying to escape out of the apartment. So I'm like, oh, my God, now she's stuck here. So I grab her and I take her in the other room. And I get on the phone and call the police. I said, there is somebody in his house. I'm in the house with a whole bunch of screaming and holl and freak out women and girls and everybody freaked out. And they was like, well, we're on the phone with your other sister right now, but we can't be in the phone with both of y'all.

I said, well, you can get off the phone with me. Stay on the phone and try to comfort her because they're freaking out. And so at this point, everyone still thinks that he's in the house, but he's actually jumped out the window and no one knows it yet. Right. Okay. That's so, I mean, and it's the middle of the night, right? 2 o'clock in the morning, 2.30 morning, yeah.

Oh, my God. Okay. And so we see the police, the police pull, up, but they didn't pull up with no light, no nothing. All they got, all you see is a bunch of flashlight going around. So that was my chance. So I opened the door. I said, Jayda, you're safe.

I said, stay here, you're safe. I'm going to go let the officers in. I have to walk past the kitchen to get to the front door. So I opened the door, I said, he's in the kitchen. Oh, okay. Get that motherfucker. He is in the kitchen. Mm-hmm.

So they go in the kitchen and come to find out the window is wide open. I prepared myself to die that night because I knew I had to protect my sisters. And people don't understand the feeling that you get when you're preparing to to die. I knew that he had went there to get a weapon or anything like that because it's just not registering that this dude that jumped out the whole window. And I blame myself for it because remember I told you I was cooking. I had left a window open. He used the garden, the city garbage can to get in the window. Right.

How is, how is Kelly at this? I mean, because she also has to like protect her daughter. She was attacked. How was she in those moments? I had nair. And my sister, she is a true, she's a street. girl. She is a hooded girl. So when I seen the fear in her and the everybody just shaking profusely, like it was so, I had never seen my family that scared in my life. And I just thank the police. I was just so happy. I was like, thank y'all for coming to save my family and stuff like that. And they escorted us all. But, you know, I'm a, I watch Faridic Files. I watched First 48.

I said, I got some skin. You know, I started naming shit. I'm like, I got skin under, I got his skins under my nails. He left his t-shirt in the house. And the t-shirt was wet from his sweat. So I'm like, I got a t-shirt, figureprints, and all from the windows still. And so I went, you know, back in those days, we used the yellow pages. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I'm sitting there going through the yellow pages trying to find and investigate them. You went to you in detective mode? I went in straight detective. I was up that whole. They escorted us off the property at about three something, four o'clock. So we all go to the house that I was staying at at the time. Okay. And so I'm sitting there going through the yellow page just looking for an investigator,

looking for an investigator. Finally, I'm calling everybody. And one man, and he called me back. And he was like, hey, oh my God, I heard your voice mail. And I want to come and get the, you don't have to worry about no money or nothing like that. I want to come and get the evidence. I said, yes, come on. I meet you at the apartment.

So later on that day, remind you, I was calling local news people too. Because I'm like, I just cannot rest. You know what I'm saying? Until this gets handled. But nobody's answering me from WASF. So when I get to the house, the investigator who was up. Now, at the time of the investigator pulling up, now the neighborhood is everybody upset. Now, everybody's saying like, oh, this ain't happening to y'all.

Yeah, y'all are the troublemakers. Y'all bringing this drop into the neighborhood. So I'm arguing back and forth with the neighbors. So as that is all this is happening at the exact same time, I'm arguing with the neighbors. I got the detective pulling up with the local neighbors. news station and I got the church bus telling me hey here's a flyer which the paper I had in my hand they're like here's the flyer for you to go to church you know you can bring the kids and stuff like all this is going on so how how did the local news find out who like how did they find out

the detective was cool with Elizabeth gentle and I guess he said hey this is a story that this dude is like he own one like you know i was you know when i talk i speak with my body expression you know what i'm saying i'm you know and so i guess he felt that and he heard my voicemail and he like oh yeah you might want to cover this story so she's covered with a mic so while i'm arguing with the neighbor and elizabeth walking up to me and she's like an Do you want to say anything about what happened last night? And the lady's still talking shit on the side. So I look, I said, yeah, hell, obviously, I wasn't talking to dudes, to be truthfully honest.

I was talking in response to the neighbors. So when she said the camera was on, it was so easy for me to be like, well, obviously, when you get through running your mouth, You all need to hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husbands, too, because they're raping everybody out here. Because what people don't know is the very next day, that same person tried to break into another person's house and do the very same thing. Only she had a boy there who had a gun. Okay. So that's a question. That's something that I mean, I wanted to ask you. I'd love to talk to Kelly at some point as well because I feel like there's so many different versions of who this person was, what is religious. relationship was to everybody, like in your, from, from where you're coming from, like, who, who, who was it?

I'm going to say, I only said this a couple of times because I felt like it really didn't matter, but now that I'm older, it does matter. Okay. So a couple of days before, remind you, my sister had just moved in this apartment. She wasn't even there a month. Okay. So, but a person that we had already knew that was out there had. came and knocked on my sister door and said, you know, they've been talking about running in your shit. They said you, you booming too hard, like you moving too hard, you pushing too much weight and stuff like that. Like, they talk about coming in here robbing y'all or whatever. So, of course, nobody is paying attention to nothing like that because you look at it as like, oh, there's some hating shit. Not thinking that it's going to actually happen because a couple of

days later after that visit, it really did happen. Kevin admits he can't prove who he, Kelly, or anyone suspected was the man who assaulted her. But it wasn't a question the public had a lot of interest in at the time as it was. But he and his sister's lives changed pretty immediately once the news clip aired. It was a baditude almost destroyed us. I'm not going to lie. What is that experience like?

When do you start to realize, like, this is a thing? Okay, so after I did the interview with Elizabeth Gentiles, because that was in the morning time. Yeah. And so later on that night, it aired on local TV. And so everybody was hitting me up on Facebook and text me and they're like, oh, I just see your interview on the news.

Boy, that's crazy. It's hell, boy, you're crazy than luck. And I'm like, I don't find this shit funny. Like, what is funny about it? You know what I'm saying? Like, this is. still fresh, we are still scared and, you know, still looking over our shoulders. Not to mention the endless nightmares that I had to go through with my family,

them having dreams about them coming in. You got to be blocking all the doors and the windows and, like, it changed our life. Traumatizing. So it aired that night. So I'm like, okay, cool, it's cool. And then somebody hit me up and was like, oh, they put it on YouTube. You got 360. views. I'm like, wait, what?

360 views? I'm like, there, are people really watching me like that? So I'm on YouTube, I'm watching it. And the next thing I know I'm watching it is 5,000 views, 10,000 views, 50,000 views, 500,000 views. I said, oh, my God. Like, it is so many people watching this shit.

Like, but why? You know what I'm saying? Then all of a sudden, I started getting people in boxing me, they were saying, like, hey i want to uh bring you to my um can you come up making appearance here we'll pay you we set you up in hotels and stuff so i'm thinking like what the fuck is going on like i'm so confused as like what is happening because this is all has happened in one day so i'm like what is going i'm like freaking out and then um everybody i had a couple of people reaching out to me to manage me and stuff like that and so i was like um this one person had hit me up and was like

if he cannot meet your manager if he can't meet a person in person and sit down and have dinner or coffee or lunch with them then they shouldn't be your manager yeah and so i was like damn so i so i end up meeting with this one particular guy who which which was richard figaroa my first manager and we went to a coffee shop and he was like look i want to represent you all over the place in Huntsville. And so he was like, I want to represent you. You're everywhere.

Everybody's talking about you. I think you need the proper management. Not to mention that he was going to the projects looking for me and stuff trying to find me because he felt like. Where did he come from? Like where was he based? He was already based in Huntsville. See, these are the people who, these are the people who was like managing Naomi Campbell and stuff like that. Naomi Campbell's old manager who was Beth Bolt.

she was born in Huntsville and so she was a supermodel back in her day and so of course she the one who discovered Naomi did Ashley Christian's first photos and all these people so it was it was a no-brainer to go with a person who was already familiar with management how soon after the clip airing does all of that happen is it pretty instantaneous it was immediately it was like Like when I did the interview that morning and with the investigator, by 12 o'clock, that same night, I was already being talked about. And so the next day, that's when I started getting everybody hitting me up saying they love the video and wanted me to come and make appearances and stuff like that. And the song had not been created yet. See, I was, yeah, I was already huge for the song.

And so when they did, I guess the Gregory brothers, they did a clip of the song. And I was mad. I'm not going to lie. I was mad than the motherfucker because I thought, I thought that they was making fun, you know, because we're still traumatized. You know what I'm saying? It was just all in a couple of days time. I think the clip came.

came out like a week later okay and they had such a good response to it like a heavy response they came and said hey we want to create a whole song you know what I'm saying we want to make sure you get compensated we want to split the split everything 50 50 and we went into contract and they did the whole song and once that song came out bad and truly became a life of We are going to take a quick break and be back with Kevin Antoine Dotson after this. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York state number, and we own you.

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And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, got you. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum. the Houston lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes it's hard to remember, but... Going through something like that is a traumatic experience, but it's also not the end of their life. That was my dad, reminding me and so many others who need to hear it, that our trauma is not our shame to carry, and that we have big, bold, and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us. I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leah Tretate.

On my new podcast, The Unwanted Sorority, we weighed through transformation to peel back healing and reveal what it actually looks like, and sounds like, in real time. Each week, I sit down with people who live through harm, carried silence, and are now reshaping the systems that failed us. We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls, mothering as resistance, and the tools we use for healing. The unwanted sorority is a safe space, not a quiet space. So let's walk in.

We're moving towards liberation together. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to 16th Minute. Here is part two of my interview with Kevin Antoine Dodson. It's not like there's really anyone to turn to, to be like, well, this is how it's done. Like, you kind of have to improvise as you go, right? Like, there's no.

Right. And that's what, and that's the hard time that I have because I just did a video just recently that went viral. And they still talk about that. That video go viral every other day. But they were saying like, oh, he didn't take his lemons and make lemonade. But what people don't understand that I was the first viral person. person to go viral like that. So they didn't know how to market me.

And I had so many networks, they would tell me like, we don't know what to do with you. This has like never happened before. We don't know how to market you. We don't know where to place you. All I know is that everybody wants you, but we don't know what to do with you. And after hearing that hell, I didn't even know what to do with myself at the time. I mean, how would you? Right.

Right. But they swear, people swear up and down. like they act like I had the guide to fame and I didn't we did not know what to do so when it all was down it was like we can no longer go to Kelly's house because like fans will pull up they would be out there waiting for hours like we had because we were still cool with the neighbors and the neighbors they were getting upset they're like man this chaos out here like all these people pulling up and drools you had people flying from flying from other cities and states you had people driving in coming to that apartment i'm talking about it was like a

museum to them so i sat with myself and i said you know what i can make something out of this if these people are asking me to come here and never for some money i can move us out of this situation right so i'm telling my family this shit and they're like no i don't think you should do it i think this is dangerous and stuff like that i'm like y'all i don't care what y'all say do it. I'm going to take these trips. I'm going to sign this contract with this manager because I feel like they can help me and put this into perspective. They can help organize because I don't know what I'm doing. Right. And that's how that happened. So I just went on and started doing my thing. How did Kelly feel about that at the time? Yeah, how were you? Because it's like you guys have to

navigate this together as things keep going. How was she dealing with it? How was she feel like did she have different instincts from you or yeah if you pay attention to the beginning of all that me and kelly was traveling together we had did touch point oh together we was doing videos together we was doing all type of stuff together but her boyfriend at the time convinced her like they're making fun of y'all they're not laughing with y'all they laughing at y'all and and at the time he had a little money you know what I'm saying so it was easy for her to say yeah I'm going to ride with this dude. And she rode with this dude, and I started traveling by myself.

And she went on with her dude, and my mom and them, they didn't really have nowhere to go. My other siblings and stuff didn't have nowhere to go. So I went out there and work. And when I made my first check, I put them in a house. Okay. Yeah, because I was seeing that coverage from like August of that year where I think you posted that, you know, that there's like you have this huge hit on iTunes, but you still live in the projects and there's this like dissonance to what's going on. So from your perspective, it's like capitalize on the moment and improve the families. Right. Right. And that's

what I did. Okay. I mean, that makes total sense. So, okay, so now you are making, I mean, does Bet and Truder kind of become your full time living at that point? Oh, yeah. Oh my God. I couldn't go nowhere. I couldn't do nothing. Like, it just became everything was about better through the every conversation I had. Everything that was going on was making deals, was getting on the airplane, was living in hotels. See, I didn't get me a place to stay right away because now at this time I'm traveling a lot. Yeah. I'm not in the, I'm not staying in the, I mean, Huntsville no longer than two days. So it's easy for me to either. go stay at my manager's house or go lay on my mama's couch and then I'm back on the plane.

You know what I'm saying? So, yeah, very and truly became my whole life for two years. See, what people failed to realize with me and Kelly when I knew the trauma. Trauma happened like I explained to you, trauma has happened all our lives. So we know how to go through some shit, get back up, dust ourselves again, off, and try again. So it was never the, it was never getting over the trauma. It was the fact of, you know, having a nightmare here, seeing Kelly screaming out of her sleep, seeing her daughter scream out of her sleep, her mama screaming out of it. My mama screaming out of her sleep, my sister.

It was going through that and how to balance that all out because we're not used to, they say that everybody kept saying like, y'all need some serious counseling. You know what I'm saying? And in our mind at the time, it's like, how could you talk to somebody who don't know you? You know what I'm saying? How could you, you know, which right now, man, you're talking, which is very therapeutic for me. Like, I feel like I'm getting all this out because I rarely talk about the life from Chicago. Because everybody is so focused on 2010 on up.

And now since so much time has passed by, now everybody is asking like, who is Antoine Dawson, we want to know more about Antoine Dawson. And I have been in conversations with Netflix, Lifetime, because I don't want to give too many details about my life because I would hate to wake up one day and see somebody then did a movie

or... Right, without your consent, yeah. Yeah, about a story because even though it's trauma, my life story is good as hell. Kelly Life Story is good as hell. And I'm telling you, it's going to make somebody a lot of money if they get it right. Right. Because the narrative was, I don't know if you remember, but the narrative was, this was the setup for fame.

We did this to become famous. Like, they really thought that this was like some type of skit. And that was another thing that we had to fight. And that shit pissed Kelly off. Yeah, well, yeah, because it's like that's just, again, discounting this traumatic violent incident. Like that's, oh, that makes me so mad.

I do remember that being presented. And I don't know. I went back yesterday and today and watched the original clip. And there's so much that I think a lot of it is because it didn't end up in the song, but like the more upsetting parts of the clip, like the scene of the crime,

like there's so much included in that report. And it's just boiled down to these couple of quotes. Right. And see, nobody knew that I taught we that we talked to WAAFF. We was out there for hours talking back and forth, arguing with

everybody like this went on for hours with the investigators and everything but they you know how we do in the industry. They shorten all the clips and that's what you got. How did the investigation did the investigation ever resolve?

As the time went on and I began to work and stuff like that, I can honestly say I did kind of drop the ball with the investigation because now I'm trying to make this money. I'm trying to get us out of the situation. I'm trying to because none of us, you know, we never really had shit in life. So I was trying to get something for them. Even if he never got caught, I wanted to make sure that I had something for us when all this wore down.

And yeah, I dropped the ball with that. I mean, did it ever feel like during those early years that, like, you were, I mean, that there was like inherent, like racism, inherent homophobia to the way that you were being treated by the media? Yeah, oh my God, I'm so glad to do that. Let's talk about that. Yeah. Let's talk about that because, you know, I was, I've always been known for hair and shoes. You know, I used to get my hair pressed out and wear wigs and weeds. Back then, that was not popular. They did not want that. I had one person who wanted me to be trans. Like, they wanted to pick me on the trans side of

things. And I was like, no, I'm not trans. I'm just a feminine flamboyant boy who liked long nails, long hair. I like to be a pretty boy. But I know that I am a man. So they, when I did get out here and work and stuff, they did not want the long hair. They did not want the long nails. They didn't want the flamboyant, Antoine. They were. not rocking. Fast forward today, you see all these men on the internet in Whigs making a hell of a lot of money and it is approved. Everybody, what's the word I'm looking for? It's accepted. Everybody is accepting it. And I feel like I'm the blueprint of that. To this day, Kevin has a good relationship with the Gregory brothers. He mentioned that when his mother passed away several years ago,

the brothers helped him pay for the funeral. But what I found most interesting were Kevin's reflections on how things have changed online since he became prominent in 2010, particularly as it pertains to perception and compensation. Well, I see that now, do you remember the Me Too movement? Yep. And stuff like that. See, now it had became open because in 2010, when you tell somebody that you got raped or sexually assaulted, like, don't say that. Oh, no, my God, don't, don't say that. Don't do that. Now you got

ditty being exposed. You got all these different celebrities being exposed and stuff talking about and stuff like that. So I like to believe that Bader Tudor and that interview and stuff kind of led to what's happening now. I believe that Bader Tudor is starting to bring awareness to a lot of things that was happening. So are you still in touch? with the Gregory brothers now? See, when I did that just did that video that went viral, people had it in their mind that I wasn't getting paid for the song. And me and the Gregory brothers, we have a good bit.

See, they thought when I did that interview, I was not talking about the song because most people use the clip, the news clip, which is owned by W-A-F-F-A-F. And they use my likeness, not necessarily the phone. And that's what I was telling them. Like, look, y'all made so much money off of that interview. You know what I understand? The only money that I made off of that interview alone,

I made $60,000 off of that interview in 14 years because WFF owns it. So where did that number come from? That's the money that I made overall. From the interview alone, like, that's not the, um, the bad and truth of the song. Okay. Because, um, with the interview, with the, people don't understand that interview has been in movies. It has been in TV shows. It has been in commercials.

It has been in people's commercials for their businesses. And I've never seen a dime of that. And I know that it generated a lot of money. They're licensing the clip. Yes. And I don't know if W.A.S. F is getting paid because somebody brought

something to my attention. They were saying like you know the WFF got paid for your video on YouTube when they put it on YouTube and got all a millions of views off me? They got a check for that. Yes. I didn't. I didn't go viral on my page. I've never

went viral on my page. What people don't understand is I have been going viral every other month for the last 14 years. on other people's pages. And I have watched people make bread. I have watched people and I know that these apps make money.

And when you see Antoine Dyson, if you see a video of somebody doing Antoine Dotson and using my likeness in that video and you got 10 and 15 million views, I know that you're making money from, I'm not dumb. Of course. I know that you're making money from that. And nobody say, well, here, Antoine, here's a cut. Here's five. You know what I'm saying?

I appreciate you doing Bann & Trudeau or whatever. But the Gregory brothers have been, have always been full. They have always been good to me. I'm still living off of Bann and Trudeau's song money. Okay. And I have a good relationship with them. We travel together when we want to perform. I got to tell you this story real quick.

It's so funny. It's quick. So we was at BET Award. no not beat t awards we was at 106th apart and so you know the gregory brothers all them are brothers and sisters and they got a wife that's a part who's seen yeah so we was in a dresser room she walked in a dresser room she was like that's uh oh my god this is such a dream come true to sing bad and trun and they're climbing in your window at bt i'm i'm holl it because you know they're white so funny like we all know all

Every time we get together, it's like a, it was so funny. And in spite of it all, Kevin is still online today, making regular content for TikTok, either commenting on the news or reflecting on his career as an influencer. And if you happen to be a prospective or recovering character of the day, here's his advice. To be successful in Internet, because I noticed with a lot of, internet stars after me nobody really they burn out very fast two to three months and they're done see it's been 14 years for me because I never shied away from who I truly was and who I truly am I always try to stay as close as to who I am as possible because when you start doing all this

crazy shit for clicks you burn out and then you don't have to do videos every day all day you burn out like that there's a balance to this internet stuff for one you have to be authentic and i notice that everybody is biting off each other everybody is doing the exact same thing and they're burning out my advice is be authentic be as authentic as you can possibly be because that is going to take you far. So talking with Antoine or Kevin as he goes by in his personal life was completely surreal. I wasn't expecting to be starstruck in the way that I was, but he is someone who has lived in my mind for a decade and a half, and it's a very particular kind of celebrity encounter.

I want to thank him for his willingness to be open with me about his childhood, as well as his experience becoming internet famous. And you can check out what he's up to now at the links in the description. Understanding Kevin's life better really helpful. this story into focus for me, but there's still that element that never quite sat well, that the further this story got away from the public, the less we heard about Kelly Dodson. What the fuck is that about? We're going to talk about that in part two next time on 16th minute. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and I Heart Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced

by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, my cats flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird who will outlive us all. Bye. Goodbye.

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