When Vic Mensa called out the recently deceased rapper XXXTentacion earlier this month, a swarm of fans went on the offensive. One of the loudest voices, with almost half a million Twitter followers to preach to, was Adam Grandmaison, aka Adam22.
Grandmaison, who founded the popular podcast and video blog No Jumper (2.3 million subscribers), gave XXXTentacion the first long-form interview of his career. From his appearance on No Jumper, which The New York Times has crowned “The Paris Review of the face-tattoo set,” X went on to worldwide acclaim and rap-world infamy. His legacy, as both a beloved musician and a man with a history of abuse, is still hotly disputed. Grandmaison is on the front lines of this back and forth. He promptly went after Mensa on social media, soliciting unflattering stories about the rapper from his followers.
Mensa proceeded to call attention to the fact that Grandmaison himself was accused of sexual assault by two women in a March 2018 Pitchfork article. “Everyone is shitting on you and you think bringing up a fake allegation is gonna work. Nice,” Grandmaison responded. Grandmaison has frequently denied these sexual-assault accusations; in a March statement, he tweeted, “A girl i dated for a few months 10 years ago is coming out saying that i raped her and assaulted her. these claims are new. she has no evidence. i have plenty of emails from her that make it clear how absurd these claims are. you’ll probably get to read them all in time. I’ve done plenty of stupid shit in my life. but I’ve never raped or hit a woman.”
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But, as social-media users were quick to point out, Grandmaison has repeatedly confessed to physically abusive behavior online. In 2006, Grandmaison posted a thread on the 2+2 Forums titled, “Ask Adam22 questions about the 27 girls he has slept with.” The thread features photos of many of the women described, as well as graphic accounts of sexual acts. In response to one question, “do you beat your women,” he responded, “last year some girl my room mate banged (who i also banged, number 12 i think ) got really mad because i made some innapropriate joke about her being a conservative chick who gets gangbanged and she pushed me from behind while i was playing poker so i turned around and mushed her face in ( mushed = i put my hand on her face and pushed her away from me as hard as i could, sending her flying ).”
Grandmaison continued with another story that took place when he was “hanging out with this girl off of myspace.” He wrote that they argued, and she pushed him off of the bed. “So i take this bottle of water i’m holding and hold it over her head and i was going to let a droplet fall out onto her face while she was laying there with her eyes closed ( i don't know why i thought it would be a good idea to do this to an enraged woman ). she looked up before i could let the droplet fall off and jumped to her feet and straight up punched me in the face. i then felt it would be a good idea to point the water bottle in her face and spray it. this provoked her even more so she pushed me back onto her room mate’s bed and punched me again. i reacted by lifting both of my feet and planting them in her chest as hard as i could, sending her flying back 10 feet into her room mate’s desk.”
He concluded, “I got up, looked at her sitting there dazed in a pile of furniture and books, said ‘you’re a crazy b!tch’ and walked back to my car and went home.”
In a written statement, Grandmaison told The Daily Beast, “I recall both of those stories and I recall that in both instances I was assaulted beforehand. I don’t recall the specifics of the ‘mushing’ story except that it was a reaction to get the girl to leave me alone because she was all up in my face yelling at me. I remember the other story very well and the girl jumped on top of me and punched me numerous times in the face. I did react by pushing her off of me with my feet but I immediately left as she had initiated the violence and I wanted nothing to do with it.”
Grandmaison also reportedly admitted to physically assaulting a woman on his BMX blog, the Come Up. Although the post, titled “my response to recent allegations,” cannot be recovered in the web archive, a 2014 article on the story links to the “full apology” and summarizes a since-deleted account from Grandmaison’s alleged victim. The article summarizes, “She was talking, when Adam told her that if she didn’t shut the fuck up, then he would ‘make her shut up,’ and then began choking her,” and had to be pulled off of her.
The Come Up post reportedly consisted of Grandmaison “apologizing for the things he did, adding that he has changed a lot since these incidents occurred, and even talked to [his alleged victim] for multiple hours and apologized.” Grandmaison did not provide the original post to The Daily Beast, but did recall the incident in question. “I had a brief incident with a good friend of mine about 8 years ago where I was stuck in a car with her after the bar for like 30 minutes,” he wrote. “She was screaming hysterically at me (she was upset about me cheating on her friend) and i did lunge at her at one point but it got broken up immediately.”
“I absolutely regret it but luckily nothing really happened. Regardless, I regret losing my patience in that moment and I in no way condone any sort of violence towards women.”
In an interview with DJ Akademiks ahead of the Pitchfork exposé, Grandmaison commented on the account of a woman who would be referred to in the article as D. When asked by Akademiks if there are “other people who claim you raped them,” Grandmaison stated, “Not that I know of.” However, as Pitchfork noted, he previously published blog posts about D and his second accuser, known by the pseudonym Jane, on his personal website. He wrote about Jane, publishing her first name and pictures of her, in December 2009, titling the post: “The Time a Girl Accused Me of Rape.”
The blog post, which can be viewed on the internet archive, begins, “Listen, I may be many things… rude, mean, seriously lacking in compassion, overweight. But one thing I’m not is a rapist. Or so I thought.” He continues to describe their Manhattan meet-up in graphic detail, writing, “She was weird to mess around with because she wouldn’t really make any moves on me. Like she was letting me touch her all over and was making out with me the whole time, but she didn’t seem like she was really enjoying it all that much. How much a woman enjoys sexual activity is usually not highly correlated to how much fun I’m having though, so I didn’t give it much thought.”
Later, Grandmaison said he heard that Jane had told people that he sexually assaulted her. “I decided to confront this girl head on (or as head on as you can confront someone on the internet) by posting a thread on [the B9 message board]…I basically laid out my whole position, which was that her and I had had consensual sex and that no rape took place. I asked her what reasoning she could have possibly had for making such a harmful accusation? Was she trying to impress her boyfriend? Did she feel guilty about having what she may have considered promiscuous sex with me? I just wanted to know.” Grandmaison’s blog post went on to list “a few things on my side” in the apparent hopes of disproving Jane’s allegation. They include the fact that his roommate didn’t hear any “noises that would indicate anything non-consensual occurred,” and “Numerous male posters who had dealt with [Jane] in the past posted claiming that she was a pathological liar and constantly made things up for attention.”
The blog post concludes, “Anyway, for most men, being falsely accused of rape is a horrible experience that can ruin their reputation, cost them thousands in legal fees and may land them in jail, but for me I would have to say that it was overall a very positive experience. Viva la fake rape.”
Jane shared her account of the incident with Pitchfork. “At first I was OK with it, but quickly became uncomfortable as it went further than I wanted to go,” she recalled. “I told him I wasn’t into it, but he didn’t stop and became pretty angry. Meanwhile, I’m not a big girl, I’m 5’4” and Adam is well over 6’0” and a pretty big guy. I was terrified and froze while he had sex with my basically lifeless body. I was too afraid to fight back in fear that he would hurt me, so I just laid there in terror. I just remember staring out the window and praying it would be over soon. Eventually, he stopped. I changed and immediately left.”
Grandmaison told The Daily Beast that he and Jane “had consensual sex multiple times.” He continued, “Then one day a girl I was dating told me that [Jane] had told a new guy she was dating that I raped her. I was pissed, so I called her out on the messageboard even though this was something she had only said to one person…Then a few years later I recounted the whole story on my blog.”
D, who first started talking to Grandmaison through the B9 message boards in 2006, told The Daily Beast that she recalled the back and forth between Jane and Grandmaison on the message boards: “[Jane] came forward and said that Adam raped her, and then he created all these threads about her and started posting intimate pictures of them and calling her a liar, a slut. He pretty much denied everything and then doxxed her. I remember the thing with [Jane] happening, and I was like that really sucks, that’s really fucked up of Adam, but it was just so normalized because of his other behavior, the other fucked up and obscene shit that he did, so I just didn’t get that it was wrong, because everything else that he had done just made that seem normal.”
D later cited another story that Grandmaison wrote about on his blog, a prank that his roommate played on a sleeping woman (pictures of the half-naked, passed-out woman accompany the post). “And now that I realize it, I look back at all of that and think, fuck, how was I so naive, to think that he wouldn’t do the same thing to me?” D said. “And it just makes me so sad, that someone like this exists, that their MO with every person that they were with romantically was just to harm them or shame them.”
Adam Kirby, a former 14-year poster on the B9 board, told The Daily Beast that Grandmaison would “often post about sexual acts in explicit detail all over the board.” He also recalled Grandmaison sharing explicit photos of women, although Kirby couldn’t definitively say that these photographs were published non-consensually. “The one that usually sticks out in my mind is a picture of him from the waist down straddling another poster and ejaculating on her face,” he said.
“When it came out that that dipshit who spent his days playing online poker and bragging to strangers and teenagers on the internet with stories of his sexual exploits was managing XXXTentacion, being around other people of questionable character and history, and having new allegations come out against him, none of it was a surprise,” Kirby added. “This is a guy who’d refer to rape as ‘surprise sex’ and throw ‘rape’ into people’s usernames after they accused him of assault [this is a reference to Jane, who Kirby says Grandmaison and his buddies began referring to as ‘stay_raped,’ a reference to her B9 username].”
Another B9 poster and moderator, Jesse, told The Daily Beast that while she and Grandmaison never interacted, she recalled him frequently posting about his sexual exploits: “He posted a photo of a good friend of mine when they had dated briefly that she did not consent to. It was almost a badge of honor for him to do these things, to get into sexual situations and take pictures to post on the board afterwards.”
“I never posted any nude photos of anyone without consent on the B9 board,” Grandmaison told The Daily Beast. “Although I was certainly very open about my sex life at that time.”
As D told Pitchfork, she and Grandmaison started talking when she was 16, and met up in person three years later when he flew to see her in Vancouver. “D met Grandmaison at the airport and they had dinner,” the article reported. “D told Pitchfork that although she had wanted to kiss him, she hadn’t wanted to have sex with him that night. ‘I was like, ‘No, just stop,’’ she said. ‘I was pushing him off me and my hands were pushing him, really just, barricading my vagina with my hands. Like, ‘No, don’t go there, don’t put your fingers in there, don’t go anywhere there, I don’t want that.’ And then he’s 6’4” and I’m like 5’3”. I was like 120 pounds if that. He easily had 100 pounds on me. When someone is that big and they have the ability to grab both your wrists with their one hand and pull your arms over your head, you can’t do anything,’ D said. ‘And if you try, it’ll just get worse and more painful.’”
In 2010, Grandmaison wrote a series of blog posts about D. They did not mention the alleged sexual assault, but did include D’s full name, along with explicit pictures of her and graphic descriptions of sexual encounters between the two of them. D told Pitchfork that, “One of the photos was taken when she was 14 and two others when she was 17.” In March, Grandmaison tweeted, “That girl said I posted underage nudes of her. In reality I never posted nude photos of her at all nevermind underage ones.”
In his statement to The Daily Beast, Grandmaison denied D’s allegations, saying, “There are a bunch of photos of us hanging out in Vancouver having a great time so I think it’s so bizarre that the world is supposed to believe I raped her at the beginning of my stay.” He continued, “Any and all photos I ever posted of D online were photos that were widely available on the B9 Board. When I re-posted them on my blog I wasn’t bringing anything new to the table, those photos were already widely spread around on the messageboard and were posted by D herself.” (D told The Daily Beast that some of the photos that Grandmaison posted were from her private Photobucket and Facebook accounts.)
Screenshots of Grandmaison’s blog posts about D have been shared extensively on social media, with an emphasis on one particularly objectionable quote: “Well she was 16, but come on man, look at her. She’s 18 or 19 in most of the pics here but she didn’t look much different at all then. If statutory rape is wrong I didn’t wanna be right.”
Grandmaison has since tweeted that, “Ok I made an inappropriate joke 12 years ago. But it was in the context of explaining why I DID NOT fuck her because I realized she was underage before I even met her.” But in a 2006 thread on the 2+2 Forums started by an alias account, Lloyd Crumlish, Grandmaison asked, “Say i met a girl who was 17 on the internet (this is hypothetical) and she told me she wanted me to visit her. she lives in canada where the age of consent is 16. i live in new york where the age of consent is, i believe, 18. have i committed a crime by traveling there with the intent to have sex with her?” Later on in the thread, which D told The Daily Beast matches the time they started talking, he wrote, “Can’t believe i haven’t been called out for being a 22 year old dude considering doing this. she’s almost 17 though.”
Addressing his quick abandonment of the “hypothetical,” Grandmaison wrote, “People have tweaked out on me on this board for trying to avoid paying a bill at a hospital, somehow i thought trying to bang a 16 year old would illicit a similar response. i guess when it comes to statutory rape, it’s ok.” According to Grandmaison’s original blogpost, he and D had at least one sexually explicit phone call when she was 16.
In his “27 girls” thread, Grandmaison wrote, “i don’t think I’ve done any 17 year olds since besides one last year. it was awesome…I am 22 right now.” In another post, he described a “notable” encounter: “she was like 17 and i was 19, she met me online or whatever and was all star struck because she has heard about my reputation or whatever. i hung out with her once and messed around with her sort of as a joke, then one day i was bored and asked her to hang out again ( this time i knew that her virginity was to be mine ) and we did, ended up just driving around for like an hour finding a place to have sex. parked behind an elementary school where she went to school when she was a kid and started making out, i got her naked ( i prefer to stay somewhat clothed during sex in public ) and removed her virginity with the greatest of ease. the whole scene of me picking her up to just do that was pretty sketchy, especially because of the location.”
Grandmaison noted in his blog that D strongly objected to the posts, and wanted him to take them down. In one 2010 email exchange reviewed by The Daily Beast, D wrote, “Another blog dedicated to me? Don’t you have anything better to do? This is getting obsessive.” Grandmaison responded, “It’s fun. I’m willing to discuss this with you more here but i’m going to have to post it after.” When D reiterated that she wanted the posts deleted, threatening legal action, he replied, “Go for it.”
Grandmaison has posted other emails from D on Twitter, offering her friendly tone and instances where she did not specifically allege sexual assault as evidence that the assault did not occur. D told The Daily Beast that, in addition to not being a “confrontational person,” she was “fucking scared.”
“Of course I was going to try and be nice to him, because I didn’t know what else he was going to do! It’s like being in a hostage situation, and someone’s holding a gun to your head—are you going to tell him to go fuck himself? No, not if you want to live,” she said.
She recalled asking Grandmaison to take down the blog posts “multiple times” and being refused repeatedly. “I was like, hey, I sent you these pictures in private, in confidence. And he took these pictures that I sent him and other pictures from my private Photobucket and pictures from my Facebook, and he created this elaborate false narrative about me. And I just realized, I no longer get to decide who I am. Because this guy took that away from me.”
Grandmaison told The Daily Beast that he did eventually remove the post after D asked, writing, “It was only online for around a year.”
“I just remember knowing how many people read it, because everyone was texting me about it,” D continued. “My parents, who are older, they were seniors at the time, and even they knew about it. And knowing that my classmates had read it and that I would have to go to school the next day and see them…I actually withdrew from that semester at school, because it just fucked me up so badly. I couldn’t trust anyone.”
“You know the burn book from Mean Girls? Imagine if it was written only about you, and it was nailed to the door of every person in the world. Cause that’s what the internet is, right? Everyone has access to it. I just remember being like, whoa, everyone has like, seen my ass, not by my choice. Everyone has seen my private photos. And in some of those pictures I was underage.”
Grandmaison has emphasized that he and D spent time together “ten years ago.” But while it may be in the past for Adam22, D has been wading through the aftermath of their relationship, and his online offensive, ever since. She recalled asking for legal advice after the blog posts, “Because I was like, I’m going to graduate university in a few years, what are future employers going to think when they see that?” They told her that one of the best things she could do would be to create more Google links for her name in order to drown out Grandmaison’s story. So she started modeling, seeing it as one of the quickest ways to create more content on the internet.
“I’m not a model,” D laughed. “But I didn’t want to put my designs out there, because I didn’t want to have my name as a designer, my future career, related to what was going on at the time. So I was like OK, I’m going to model, and I’m going to book as many shoots as I can, I don’t care how shitty they are, I don’t care, I just need to get as much content as I can out there to push what he created below that, that’s what I need to do.”
She had to deal with “aggressive men on the internet after being sexually assaulted,” and generally described modeling as a “double-edged sword” because, “The more I put myself out there, the more likely he would see it, and what if he did something else? It was a risk I had to take. I had to go out of my comfort zone to do something I didn’t want to do. And at any given point, I still had to wonder, what could he fucking do? I don’t know what this man is capable of. I’m scared every day of my life, and I have been for almost ten years. And I just want to not be scared anymore.”
Although D came forward in March, she “had been coming out to my friends and family privately for years before,” which Pitchfork confirmed—she just didn’t realize that Grandmaison had built up enough of a platform that people would actually care about her accusation. In a public statement, she wrote that, “Adam Grandmaison is a serial sexual predator who manipulated and raped and abused me when I was a teenage girl. He documented it for everyone to see. His method is to doxx women or try to shame them publicly into silence…He demeans women and rubs it in their faces, while hiding behind a Twitter army of 14-year-old boys who laugh and cheer him on.”
Lauren Duck recently became the focus of an online Adam Grandmaison smear campaign, which she believes to have been an attempt to “get out in front of” their story.
Duck visited L.A. last year for a No Jumper interview. She told The Daily Beast that she started drinking “right when I got to the studio.” After the interview, she went with Grandmaison to a party, and then an after party. “Earlier in the night, I had asked Adam if I could stay with him because I needed somewhere to stay—him and [his girlfriend]’s place, so I thought that that wasn’t weird or anything. And then we’re at this after party and he offers me a Xanax. And I take it, on my own, but I was extremely drunk. So I don’t remember much that happened afterwards.” She says they went back to his apartment and started hooking up. “And I’m conscious, I am,” Duck continued. “But I’m not really aware of what’s going on. And then I remember we were sitting there, and I realize that I’m being videotaped, and I look up at Adam and I’m like, are you videotaping me? And he was like, yeah. And then I don’t remember anything else after that.”
At the time, Duck explained, “It didn’t seem intentional.” But in retrospect, “He knew exactly what he was doing when he gave me that Xanax.” She concluded, “He gave me drugs notorious for making people black out, had sex with me and then recorded it without my consent.”
Grandmaison recalled the incident that Duck is referring to, but insisted that, “I wouldn’t say she was extremely inebriated,” and that the group’s drug and alcohol use was “with the intention of all having sex at the end of the night.”
“Everything that happened that night was entirely consensual,” he continued in his statement to The Daily Beast. “I filmed like 8 seconds of us having sex, she 100% knew I filmed it and I didn’t distribute it in any way although at some point she got the idea that I was ‘selling’ it.”
During a 2017 No Jumper interview, Grandmaison asked a guest if he “abides by the practice of just like getting girls high to fuck them, just get them real stoned and then you can fuck them? Because I’ve had my friends hate on me for that.” In his “27 girls” thread, Grandmaison wrote about “whipp[ing] out the camera with #5 once,” adding, “she got freaked out by the bright light on it and started screaming at me and inferring that I was a creep, all on the night that my grandma died (I don’t know why I was trying to make a porno after a funeral) and I never really forgave her for being so insensitive.”
Duck stayed friends with Grandmaison “for a while” after the incident, until one of his accusers reached out to her. “That was when I finally cut ties with him and unfollowed him on everything,” she explained. “I think that he started catching wind of me telling people what happened. He thinks that I said that he raped me, and that’s why he went on the rant, his little rampage on Twitter. But I never used the word ‘rape.’ I never claimed that. I think that’s just what it sounds like when I tell the story.”
In a series of August tweets, Grandmaison alleged that Duck “spent all the money from your GoFundMe to buy a bionic arm on cocaine and designer handbags.” (Duck, who has an amputated arm, told The Daily Beast that there’s an “extremely simple” explanation, saying, “It’s a 100K arm and I only raised 30K, so the money is just sitting in my mom’s bank account.”) Grandmaison continued, “This girl also told people that I gave her a bunch of Xanax the night she hooked up with me and [his girlfriend Lena]. Fortunately Lena was there and knows it’s a 100% lie. Be careful who you believe. I held all this shit in for months but fuck it let’s expose these hoes.” In another tweet, he admitted to having sexually explicit tapes of Duck, writing, “I have videos in my phone of her sucking my dick with a couple other girls. Never sent them to anyone. That didn’t stop her from spreading fake rumors saying that I did.”
Duck reached out to Grandmaison in a Twitter DM conversation, an excerpt of which was reviewed by The Daily Beast, saying that she had been told by “like 6 other people” that Grandmaison had been sharing the video of her without her consent, and had heard that he was selling the tape. “I would never baby,” Grandmaison replied. “I know the law and I’m very concerned with not going to jail.”
“Like I would sell that,” he added. “Do you know how rich I am.”
Asked about the personal ramifications of Grandmaison’s public rants, Duck told The Daily Beat, “That side of Twitter already doesn’t like me. I’ve just been really open about hating abusers in the rap industry, I’ve made that pretty clear, and that side of Twitter doesn’t like hearing that kind of shit, because they love abusers.” Still, “It’s been shitty watching nothing happen to him. I see people post stuff that he’s done, like screenshots of his blog, and I get really angry about that.”
In the same August Twitter tirade in which he attacked Duck, Grandmaison called one poster who was amplifying the accusations against him a pedophile, and accused another of physically abusing an ex. In reaction to these attacks, some people took social-media sabbaticals, according to Helen, one of Grandmaison’s targets. “He went back and forth with Lauren for hours apparently,” Helen said. “As you can see, he made it his whole day, and all you really see is just this horrifying male rage. He absolutely refuses to accept consequences, and he’ll clearly do anything to silence women and accusers.”
Atlantic Records launched the hip-hop label No Jumper records in March, helmed by Grandmaison. D doesn’t believe that the man who used his platform to shame and silence her should have that kind of reach. “Especially when you have a platform that you use to further elevate known abusers and known rapists,” she said. “What honestly kills me is that his following is young children that will go through high school, and will go through university thinking that it’s OK to conduct yourself like this, that it’s acceptable to treat people this way. It’s terrifying.”
