Photo by Sandra Rose
Last week, a fellow blogger called me to tell me that Lloyd T. Dinwiddie aka Gyant, had “lost his mind”. The friend said LT had written terrible things about me (mostly untrue) on his broke down website that he took out of mothballs for the sole purpose of putting me on blast.
I told my friend that I wasn’t interested in reading or responding to that foolishness. I added that whatever LT wrote is nothing compared to what has already been written by my other haters.
Then he read the worst of what LT/Gyant wrote:
“But on a side note to the lonely lesbian who lives with her mother. Your protection at least from me is over. If someone jumps you, or threatens to jump you in my presence I will step aside and let the ass whooping commence. This time though, I will probably just take pictures.”
Wow. After all I’ve done for him, he would wish physical bodily harm on me? He would take pleasure in photographing my broken body as I lay unconscious in the street?
Whatever reservations I had about continuing the beef evaporated when I heard that.
I had always suspected that LT aka Gyant, harbored a deep seated resentment towards females. There were all kinds of signs from the very beginning. Like the time he told me that Sohh.com was about to fire Natasha (of YBF) and give her job to him. He was ecstatic. He couldn’t stop talking about it. He took pleasure in knowing that she wasn’t aware the axe was about to drop.
When Natasha’s termination letter was ready, Gyant excitedly read it to me over the phone. Natasha hadn’t even received the letter yet
Mind you, I have no love for Natasha, but I did wonder why Gyant found such joy in taking her job when she’d never done anything to him personally.
But there were other signs that something wasn’t right with the boy. Like the time Gyant went missing for 3 days last year. Nobody knew where he was. Out of concern, I called his cell phone repeatedly, but got no response. when Gyant finally resurfaced on the 3rd day, he had a strange story to tell. He said he attended a house party where a man approached him and started a fight with him.
He claimed he didn’t know the man. he said they were both arrested and he was jailed for 3 days due to “a mix up” at the jail. he claimed jail officials “forgot” he was still in the holding cell until 3 days later.
As implausible as the story sounded – I believed him. The same day that LT resurfaced, he wrote a long post on the Sohh Atlanta blog detailing the fight at the house party and his subsequent ordeal at the jail. The post had nothing to do with Atlanta Hip Hop.
It was a bizarre post to say the least. Within minutes, the comments section on Sohh Atlanta exploded. His readers – who were far more observant than I was – lit his ass up! They saw through his lies immediately. The comments were brutal that day. Sohh.com’s IT department restored order to the comments section by deleting the entire post. Gyant and I thought the worst was over.
A week or so later, LT called me in a panic. He said one of his readers found his police report online and posted links to it all up and through the comments section on Sohh Atlanta. He mumbled something about a restraining order. He said Sohh’s IT dept. was attempting to block the reader’s IP address. But As fast as Sohh.com pulled the links down, readers were putting them back up. Gyant’s lies had finally caught up to him. He realized he had to come clean with me and tell me the truth.
He said he was arrested for violating an EPO, a restraining order taken out by a past lover. He admitted there was no fight. The “house party” was actually a down low house party. The man who took out the restraining order on Gyant was at the house party when Gyant arrived. The man called the police and Gyant was arrested.
I had to sit down. The conflicting stories were so confusing. I asked him why he made up a fake story about a fight that didn’t happen – AND posted it on Sohh.com when it wasn’t even necessary?
“I don’t knooowww!,” he wailed.
Right then I should have seen a BLIZZARD of red flags! I should have been swatting at red flags like they were a swarm of bees around my head. but instead, I took sympathy on Gyant. Sohh.com eventually deleted all the comments pertaining to the police report and the restraining order. But his readers never let him forget.
While the owner of the site continuously had his back throughout all the drama, he held nothing but contempt for her. He often said she was cheap and he got along better with her husband than he did with her. He said it bothered him that she wouldn’t pay him what he felt he was worth for writing 3 blogs.
About a month after he began his gig as Streetz (the female blogger), Gyant told me that Sohh.com’s owner contacted him to advise him to tone down his misogynistic language in his posts as Streetz. According to Gyant, she told him that, as a female herself, she strenuously objected to him referring to other females as a bitch and a whore in his posts.
He reluctantly agreed to tone it down. But later he called me after speaking with her. He was upset that the site owner didn’t understand that he wrote the Sohh Ya Heard blog “while in character” as a female. In my opinion, he couldn’t grasp the concept that while Sohh.com’s owner knew he was blogging as a female, she was a female herself who was offended by his language.
In my next installment, I’ll write about the day Gyant “accidentally” recorded an unfinished song while interviewing a well-known producer at his Atlanta studio. Gyant initially offered me the track – and I’m not gonna lie – I jumped at the opportunity to post it on my site. But then he changed his mind.
I thought he had an attack of conscience. But days later, on Nov. 22, 2007, the track appeared on a popular urban website. The song eventually made it to #1 on the charts this year.
