A history of violence: how has Chris Brown survived so much controversy?

On 30 December 2020, Jane Doe, a professional dancer who had just moved to Los Angeles, was invited by a friend to a New Year’s party on a yacht in Miami. The yacht was owned by the now-disgraced rap mogul Diddy; of course she should attend as someone trying to break into the music industry, she recalls thinking in the new ID documentary Chris Brown: A History of Violence. Once on the yacht, Jane Doe met Chris Brown, the R&B star once considered the next Michael Jackson, and still a successful touring artist. Jane Doe knew that Brown had once, famously, assaulted his girlfriend, Rihanna, on the eve of the 2009 Grammys (in fact, as the documentary reminds, Rihanna later said he assaulted her on several occasions), but that was a long time ago. She had been a kid then. Brown took an interest in her music and dance career, and offered her the first of two drinks.

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According to Jane Doe, something immediately felt off. She describes feeling heavy, suddenly very tired and nearly immobilized. Through tears (and anonymizing techniques), she says Brown led her to the back of the yacht, raped her, then put his number in her phone, in order to connect about her career back in LA – a textbook way to stay close to and confuse the victim, as the domestic violence expert Dr Carolyn West points out in the film. The two stayed in contact for several months, until Jane Doe was able, through therapy, to come to terms with what had happened to her. “I know it for a fact. Instead of telling myself that it wasn’t. It was. It was rape,” she says in the film. She filed a lawsuit, she says, only because she was advised that it would help another woman who had a similar experience with Brown.

Only some of this is new information – Jane Doe’s lawsuit was first reported in the press in January 2022, becoming one of several stories, confined to legalese and copious use of the word “alleged”, surrounding Brown in the 15 years since the Rihanna assault made global, galling headlines. The ID film simply puts these stories in chronological order and asks the obvious question: why are these stories largely ignored?

Among them, and this is a non-exhaustive list: that Brown melted down and smashed a glass window backstage at Good Morning America in 2011; punched a man in the face outside a DC hotel in 2013; allegedly threw a brick through his mother’s car windshield in 2013; punched Liziane Gutierrez, who appears in the film, in the face after she tried to get a picture with him on New Year’s Day 2016. A restraining order filed in 2017 by his ex-girlfriend Karrueche Tran alleged that Brown repeatedly harassed her, punched her, threatened to kill her and her friends and pushed her down the stairs during their relationship. His ex-manager, Michael M Guirguis, sued Brown in 2016, for punching him multiple times in the head and neck; the case was settled out of court in 2019.

Brown was also sued for sexual assault in May 2018 (settled out of court), arrested for sucker-punching a club photographer in July 2018 (charges dropped due to insufficient evidence), detained in France for alleged sexual assault (charges dropped), and sued by four concertgoers who claim Brown and his entourage “attacked and brutally beat” them after a show in July of this year (awaiting trial). And then there is the case of Jane Doe, which was dismissed for insufficient evidence, though domestic violence experts in the film note that Brown’s alleged behavior – flattery, promises of help, withdrawal – are typical of abusers, and that due to the difficulty of proving sexual assault, only 6% of those reported end in an arrest. Brown has denied all allegations, and through a lawyer called everything raised in the film “malicious and false”.

Chris Brown: A History of Violence is as advertised: not an investigation, but a collated history of public allegations that have never stopped Brown’s career. Brown, who exploded into pop culture as a cherubic and wildly talented 16-year-old in 2005, may have lost some of the luster for fans over the years, especially after the widely reported assault on Rihanna. But though there have been numerous proclaimed “downfalls” of his career, Brown never really went away. He still has 144 million followers on Instagram – the second-most of any male musical artist on the platform, according to the film – and is still selling out arenas, earning millions with each show on his 11:11 tour this year. He has released 11 studio albums, the most recent, 11:11, in November 2023.

The ID film, which includes a post-premiere roundtable on domestic violence convened by The View co-host Sunny Hostin, attempts to posit why Brown has prevailed relatively unscathed by the “cancel culture” he has frequently decried. For one, unlike Rihanna – and the film recalls in graphic detail Brown’s brutality toward her (I forgot, or never knew, that he choked her near unconscious in a moving vehicle) – none of Brown’s accusers have been famous. “What happened with Rihanna happened with a famous person, and there were visuals for us to look at,” says the cultural critic Scaachi Koul in the film. “With everybody else, you can just say, ‘oh, it’s bullshit. She lied. And they will give me the benefit of the doubt before they give it to some woman they’ve never heard of before.’”

And moreover, Brown still makes money. There are still enough incentives, as a music producer or consumer, to look the other way. Jane Doe’s lawyer, Ariel Mitchell, notes what it took to overcome the momentum of celebrity in the case of R Kelly, a prolific sexual abuser – not just video evidence and years of reports, but an explosive documentary series and organized boycott of his music. Or what it took for the floodgates to open on Diddy – a lawsuit by a fellow famous person, his ex Cassie, which detailed horrific alleged abuse and was settled a day after she filed in November 2023.

Ultimately, the big “reveal”, so to speak, of another documentary molded in the wake of the 2019 series Surviving R Kelly is just how much evidence and concerted effort it takes to get anything via the justice system, let alone when someone is famous. The deck, even since #MeToo, remains heavily stacked, but not insurmountably so. “We need to talk about holding ourselves accountable. Why continue to support people that we know are harmful people? What does that say about us,” says the community activist Dr Michelle Taylor in the film. “As long as anybody is a victim of intimate partner violence, we have to talk about it. No one gets a pass.”

• Chris Brown: A History of Violence is available on Max in the US with a UK date to be announced

• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html