Seven Ohio deputies sued Afroman for mocking their failed raid. A jury just handed them a much bigger problem.
Okay – here’s a feel good story for you.
The man who wrote a Grammy-nominated song about getting high in two minutes and eleven seconds just won a First Amendment case against seven armed cops. Praise Jebus.
If you don’t know Afroman, you absolutely know his song. “Because I Got High” came out in 2000, went platinum twice, got a Grammy nomination, became the most downloaded ringtone in the UK in 2002, and took about as long to write as it takes to make toast. He wrote it as a joke. For his friends. On weed. That song outlasted most of the career artists who were charting alongside it, and it did it by being genuinely funny about something real. That’s the whole Afroman formula. This is the story of how it got him sued.
And it goes a little something like this…
In 2022, Adams County sheriff’s deputies in Ohio kicked in his door with guns drawn on a warrant for drug trafficking and kidnapping.
They searched everything. They found a cake. They filed no charges, arrested no one, and left with $5,000 of his cash that they eventually had to return. The whole raid was a mistake. What they did not account for was that Afroman had home security cameras, a recording studio, and a very particular set of skills.
He made music videos. He used the actual raid footage. He called one deputy “Officer Poundcake” because the man had stood in his kitchen eyeing a cake like it was evidence. He called another one “Licc’em Low Lisa.” He made a song implying he slept with another deputy’s wife. He sold merch. The internet lost its mind.
And then, because these deputies apparently looked at the situation and thought “how can we get our piece of this,” they sued him for $3.9 million.
What followed this week was three days of a courtroom being forced to watch the videos on a projector screen at full size, with a judge present, while the deputies who filed the suit sat there and watched.
Deputy Lisa Phillips cried through a 13-minute video of herself. Deputy Shawn “Officer Poundcake” Cooley watched the Poundcake video play in open court. Deputy Randolph Walters testified under oath that Afroman claiming to sleep with his wife caused him “tremendous pain,” and when the defense lawyer asked if he knew for certain that wasn’t true, Walters admitted he wasn’t sure.
The lawyer asked: “You don’t know if your wife’s cheating on you or not?” Walters glared across the courtroom and said “you wanna go there?”
Afroman wore a full American flag suit with matching sunglasses every single day.
His lawyer closed by citing NWA and Richard Pryor. He pointed at his client in the flag suit and asked the jury: does this look like a man anyone would mistake for a news anchor delivering verified facts? The jury came back in a few hours. Afroman was vindicated.
Outside the courthouse he said “I didn’t win. America won.”
He’s right. The ACLU had already weighed in on his behalf, pointing out that public officials doing their public jobs can be criticized, mocked, made into merch, and set to a beat, and that is specifically what the First Amendment is for. A cop raiding your house and turning up on your own security cameras has no expectation that you will keep that footage to yourself. Afroman didn’t sneak into the precinct. They came to him.
What these deputies actually did was take videos that had a natural shelf life and make them immortal. The names “Officer Poundcake” and “Licc’em Low Lisa” now have a federal verdict attached to them. Every one of these officers guaranteed that this story would be the first thing anyone finds when they google their names for the rest of their careers. They came to court to make it stop. They made it permanent.
Great job, everyone!
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