Last week when I wrote about Lauren London’s preference for thugs who blow away convenience workers, I didn’t know she had already responded to the criticism surrounding her remarks in a recent KING magazine interview.
In the KING article, London is quoted as saying,
I love guys who are street. I won’t even give soft guys a chance. Menace II Society is my shit! Caine was like my first crush. Actually, O-Dog was my true dream guy. I was in love with him, from that opening scene where he pops the convenience-store worker. He had me from that gunshot [laughs]. He was ’hood, and I loved that.
During a red carpet interview with TheWeekendGamer, London claims the writer used creative editing and “said a lot of things that were false.”
Not for one second do I believe London’s claims.
For one thing, she didn’t come out and flatly deny making those statements. Instead she says “the questions being asked weren’t the questions being asked over the phone.” Okay, fair enough. But the interviewer asked London about the statements she made, not the questions that were being asked. Notice how she conveniently sidestepped the question while admitting she loves “Menace II Society” and “Gone With the Wind”..
It is standard operating procedure among journalists to change the sequence of questions in an interview to make the interview flow better. Some writers may even edit their own questions for clarity. But it is rare for a writer to edit the interviewee’s answers. It’s one thing for London to say the writer changed the questions being asked. But that was not in contention.
Therefore, Lauren, we don’t believe you, hon. We think you are trying to save face by backtracking and putting the blame on the writer. But we’re pretty sure the writer has you on tape or at least made very good notes of what you said.
Anyway, the reactions to London’s statements were swift and angry. Not so much at London for being young and dumb, but at Sgt. Willie Pete for grouping all black women in the same barrel: “Don’t try to paint all Black women with the same brush because black men would be the first to howl at the moon if we tried to say that they were all like the characters in Menace II Society,” says g-e-m2001 over at What about Our Daughters blog.
But Ed over at Dream and Hustle put the blame for the brouhaha squarely on London’s shoulders:
Lauren London is still weak as hell to me as she should have stepped up as a woman and publicly stated she was taken out of context instead of being challenged by an interviewer. She probably got a blog or a MySpace or some ish like that and could have put this discussion to rest but I see no evidence she did.
Click image to watch the scene that got Lauren all hot and bothered
