CONTENT WARNING: The following article mentions child sexual abuse.
News broke yesterday that beloved rapper, Flavor Flav had been tricked into wishing convicted child sex abuser George Pell a ‘happy retirement” in a shoutout video.
The shoutout that made us collectively cringe, showed ‘Flav say, “Hey yo, George Pell. I just gotta say, happy retirement, my man, you know what I’m saying, for real.”
“Not only that, you know what, I know you ran the boys choir man. You know what I’m saying, all of the boys on the choir respected you, you know what I’m saying, they collected you, my man.”
He also mentions ‘Tristan’ throughout the video, assume to be the person who paid $150 via website Cameo for the troll.
Now, Flavor Flav has now explained how this all came about.
Speaking to Pedestrian, the rapper explained himself. “I’ve been doing shoutouts on this app called Cameo. Everyone that books me… I just do the shoutouts. They tell me what to say,” he explained.
“So I did this shoutout for this George Pell guy – I didn’t know who the fuck George Pell is, I didn’t know what the fuck he’d done. I see I made a serious mistake by doing that shoutout.
“And then all night… I’m getting a lot of people lashing out at me. My group called me and said, ‘Flav, what the FUCK are you doing, man?’ And I said, ‘I’m just doing shoutouts!’”
“I didn’t know I was shouting out paedophiles!”
This week it was revealed that Cardinal George Pell was found guilty of child sexual abuse, after a trial in Melbourne and will be jailed.
“I wanna say to Tristan: you’re a dirty rat,” added Flav. You used me and set me up to give a paedophile a shoutout.
“That was very, very wrong of you. To all of the people George Pell did harm to: I’m sorry about this, because I did not know who he was. I would never support something like that. I hope George Pell gets what he deserves.”
