According to Foreman, police confiscated a joint, a vape pen, and $5,031 in cash. (The latter was returned.) He was never charged. A spokesperson for the Adams County Prosecutor’s Office later admitted that the raid “failed to turn up probative criminal evidence.”
“You shouldn’t kick people’s doors down over speculation, and you shouldn’t kick people’s doors down with an AR-15 over assumptions,” Foreman told Fox 19.
In the wake of the event, Foreman says he thought about suing the police, but decided against it. “I asked myself, as a powerless Black man in America, what can I do to the cops that kicked my door in?” he asked NPR. “And the only thing I could come up with was make a funny rap song about them and make some money, use the money to pay for the damages they did and move on.”
The result was Lemon Pound Cake, an album released by Afroman in 2022. Tracks such as “The Police Raid,” “Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera,” and the title song retold details of the breach in an exaggerated, hyperbolic, and oft-comedic fashion. Another song, “Will You Help Me Repair My Door,” was accompanied by a video that included footage from the breach, set to lines like “Did you find what you were looking for/ Would you like a slice of lemon pound cake/ You can take as much as you want to take/ There must be a big mistake.”
The artist also sold merch that included stills from the footage of the incident, as well as posting photos and video from the raid across his various social media accounts. In response, Adams County deputies Shawn D. Cooley, Justin Cooley, Michael D. Estep, Shawn D. Grooms, Brian Newland, Randolph L. Walters, Jr., and Lisa Phillips filed a civil lawsuit against the rapper and his label, Hungry Hustler Records, claiming “they have been ridiculed, embarrassed, and threatened since the release of the videos,” reported the Scioto Valley Guardian.
Afroman performs at the Snoop Dogg Puff Puff Pass Tour on December 20, 2018
Johnny Louis/Getty Images
“Me laughing at them, making songs about them, is more powerful than their authority,” Foreman said in response. “It’s more powerful than their assault rifles, it’s more powerful than what they got because I got these big bad tough guys crying and whining about my songs, on my page, in my world.”
It wasn’t until this week that the trial began, with Foreman in attendance in a suit patterned with the American flag. He took the stand on Tuesday, WCPO reports. “All of this is their fault,” Foreman said. “If they hadn’t wrongly raided my house, there would be no lawsuit, I would not know their names, they wouldn’t be on my home surveillance system, and there would be no songs … my money would still be intact.”
