According to an Atlantic spokesperson, Atlantic Records and Adam Grandmaison, the host of the popular podcast and video blog No Jumper, “have parted ways.”
Grandmaison, who goes by Adam22, announced in March that he was partnering with Atlantic to launch an imprint, No Jumper Records. Grandmaison has made a name for himself as a SoundCloud rap tastemaker; the New York Times went so far as to deem his podcast “The Paris Review of the face-tattoo set.” But Atlantic Record’s co-sign, which served to further legitimize Grandmaison as a hip-hop gatekeeper, was met with controversy.
In late March, Pitchfork published an article in which two women accused Grandmaison of sexual assault. Allegations had been circulating around the internet but, as Pitchfork explained, “The accusations drew more scrutiny after Grandmaison announced he was partnering with Atlantic Records to form No Jumper Records, solidifying his status.” Grandmaison denied the accusations. At the time, Atlantic Records told Pitchfork in a statement that, “We take any allegations of this nature very seriously and we are looking into them.”
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A source close to the investigation said that the initial investigation was revisited when new allegations against Grandmaison surfaced in an October Daily Beast exposé. Model Lauren Duck, who Grandmaison attacked on Twitter in August, told The Daily Beast that his tweets were likely an attempt to “get out in front of” their story. She said that she visited L.A. last year to do a No Jumper interview with Grandmaison, and went out with him afterwards. “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 recalled.
At their apartment, they began hooking up. “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.”
Duck concluded, “He gave me drugs notorious for making people black out, had sex with me and then recorded it without my consent.” Grandmaison told The Daily Beast that the group had been consuming drugs and alcohol “with the intention of all having sex at the end of the night.”
“Everything that happened that night was entirely consensual,” he continued. “I filmed like 8 seconds of us having sex, she 100 percent 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.”
In a message board thread reviewed by The Daily Beast, Grandmaison wrote about physically assaulting two women (in a written statement, he countered that, “In both instances I was assaulted beforehand”). A separate anecdote that circulated online in 2014 involved Grandmaison choking a woman in a car. Adam22 told The Daily Beast that, “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. 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.”
D, one of the first accusers, told The Daily Beast in October that she often wondered what Grandmaison was 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.”
