Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. My name is Jamie Loftus, and I
Speaker 1: am still on the Internet. If I wasn't, I'm sure
Speaker 1: my skin would look a lot better.
Speaker 2: Welcome to sixteenth Minute.
Speaker 1: If you're listening to this, you are listening to it
Speaker 1: currently and probably future obscure podcast. So I'm assuming that
Speaker 1: you're on the Internet too, and probably social media. And
Speaker 1: I know that that's supposed to be a bad thing.
Speaker 1: But like many people who are thirty yeah boo, elderly
Speaker 1: on the Internet, I cannot log out. And I know
Speaker 1: that's a bad thing. And I know I'm supposed to
Speaker 1: go and touch grass, but you know who tells you
Speaker 1: to go touch grass? People on the Internet, And I
Speaker 1: just feel like they're not telling me that From the Grass.
Speaker 1: Sixteenth Minute is the podcast where I provide a thorough
Speaker 1: sixteenth minute of fame to someone who became famous online
Speaker 1: for a fleeting moment. Why Because I want to understand
Speaker 1: what makes a character of the day, Because I think
Speaker 1: that's a more complicated question than we give it credit for.
Speaker 1: This show is about characters of the day. Because I
Speaker 1: am not too good for social media. If I was
Speaker 1: going to get off of social media, I would have
Speaker 1: done it a long time ago by now, so gather
Speaker 1: around and let's learn about the Internet. My family couldn't
Speaker 1: afford a desktop until I was in the second grade,
Speaker 1: so I have some memories before being online, the most
Speaker 1: impactful of which was being kissed on the beach by
Speaker 1: a kid who thankfully was not my biological cousin, but
Speaker 1: I did call him my cousin, so I couldn't be
Speaker 1: sure of that at the time. Anyways, here's my operating theory.
Speaker 1: I don't believe the technology is making human beings worse.
Speaker 1: Like a lot of headlines suggest, human behavior and instincts
Speaker 1: haven't changed much, but the tools that we enact those
Speaker 1: instincts with have cranked up our ability to react with
Speaker 1: impact positively or negatively, way up, not to mention the
Speaker 1: speed that we can react. Late twentieth century tabloids would
Speaker 1: really languish in reading their subjects to filth for weeks
Speaker 1: on end, and that's a far rarer experience today. Fifty
Speaker 1: years ago, it would be uniquely painful for someone who
Speaker 1: lives five thousand miles away from you to ruin your
Speaker 1: day career life, but that is no longer true, and
Speaker 1: fifty years ago you wouldn't have the instinct to do
Speaker 1: the same to someone else. People are just not built
Speaker 1: for it, but the people who live to tell the
Speaker 1: tale are very much worth talking to. I want this
Speaker 1: show to be a place that encourages you to see
Speaker 1: these people, the characters of the day, as people, and
Speaker 1: the rest I'll leave to you. Some episodes i'll be
Speaker 1: interviewing the characters of the day themselves, some I'll be
Speaker 1: talking to the people who made them characters of the day,
Speaker 1: and others I'll be zooming out a little to take
Speaker 1: a look at why the algorithm served us this person
Speaker 1: during this cultural moment and what that might mean. I've
Speaker 1: been making stuff since high school, mostly online, and if
Speaker 1: there's anything I've learned in that time, it's that everything,
Speaker 1: including what you're listening to right now, is a piece
Speaker 1: of future lost media. So enjoy it or hate it
Speaker 1: while it exists. And with that, let's get into our
Speaker 1: first character. First, a little scene setting musical transition. Ooh,
Speaker 1: nice production. Come with me if you will. To the
Speaker 1: year twenty ten, Black Swan Shutter Island, Get Him to
Speaker 1: the Greek a movie that fifteen years on has an
Speaker 1: all sex criminal cast. Twilight Mania has reached a fever pitch,
Speaker 1: but were still a year from my mom asking me
Speaker 1: if I've heard of fifty shades of gray waving around
Speaker 1: her soggy library book like a G six is playing
Speaker 1: at every school dance, and I lose my virginity this August,
Speaker 1: which was actually a really big deal to my friend
Speaker 1: group at the time, Thank you so much. Twenty ten.
Speaker 1: We didn't know what a filthy, debauched decade we'd tapped into.
Speaker 1: Social media was becoming normal at this time, not just
Speaker 1: for young people but for everyone. Twenty ten was the
Speaker 1: year my parents got on Facebook, reconnecting with high school
Speaker 1: sweethearts beginning strange emotional affairs. Facebook had surpassed MySpace as
Speaker 1: the most popular social network on the planet back in
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight and absolutely dominated, while smaller networks
Speaker 1: like Twitter, YouTube, and a then brand spanking new app
Speaker 1: named Instagram steadily grew in popularity. This character's journey, or
Speaker 1: should I say these characters journeys, started on YouTube and Reddit,
Speaker 1: but they wouldn't have become the cultural phenomenon that they
Speaker 1: did without every single one of those platforms working together.
Speaker 1: You can rarely attribute a person's fifteen minute ascent to
Speaker 1: one social media platform, especially in the days of the
Speaker 1: early Internet. If you stick in one social media corner,
Speaker 1: that tends to be where you exist forever. July twenty eighth,
Speaker 1: twenty ten, in the Lincoln Park Projects of Huntsville, Alabama. Elsewhere,
Speaker 1: an air Force plane crashes in Alaska and bullfighting is
Speaker 1: banned in Catalonia. In Lincoln Park, a news team from
Speaker 1: local station WAFT forty eight goes to speak to a
Speaker 1: woman who just reported a man breaking into her home
Speaker 1: and attempting to rape her. The newscaster interviews her and
Speaker 1: her brother, who was at the scene of the crime
Speaker 1: and tried to apprehend the man, but the rapist got away.
Speaker 1: Here's part of the clip.
Speaker 3: I was attagged by some idiot from out here in.
Speaker 4: The projects, Dodson says. An attacker used a garbage can
Speaker 4: to climb onto the unit's ledge, open the upstairs window,
Speaker 4: and then he got in bed with her.
Speaker 1: If he tried to write me, he tried to pull
Speaker 1: my clothes off.
Speaker 4: Dodson struggled with her attacker, knocking over items in her bedroom.
Speaker 4: Angeline Dodd said, heard his sister screamed and ran to help.
Speaker 5: Well, obviously we have a rapist in linked Park.
Speaker 1: Well wait, wait, let's stop the clip, because yes, this
Speaker 1: clip sets a record for streams on waft forty eighth
Speaker 1: video site, around two hundred thousand views at the time,
Speaker 1: and it first started to gain traction when it got
Speaker 1: reposted to the r slash funny page on Reddit. So
Speaker 1: this is the age of the upvote, and ninety three
Speaker 1: percent of Reddit users seemed to agree that the video
Speaker 1: clip was funny. Later that same day, someone reposted the
Speaker 1: news clip to YouTube. Remember this was before most local
Speaker 1: news channels thought about having their own YouTube pages. But
Speaker 1: it's two days later when a YouTube channel run by
Speaker 1: the Gregory brothers read Biological Brothers and a fourth member,
Speaker 1: Sarah who's now married to one of the brothers, whose
Speaker 1: channel was and is called Schmoe Yoho, posted an auto
Speaker 1: tuned remix of this broadcast that one of the most
Speaker 1: infamous moments in Internet history began.
Speaker 5: Well, obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park.
Speaker 6: He's climbing a windows.
Speaker 7: These nineteen young people a channel right from Zayani.
Speaker 4: Agacas, Paja wife, Hjukids, Taja wife, Aha, Kaids, the.
Speaker 1: Dots and siblings. Your sixteenth minute starts. Now, this was
Speaker 1: a huge story, not just because of the clip, but
Speaker 1: because of how deceptively complicated the subject matter of the
Speaker 1: clip was. The discussions around bed Intruder contained issues of
Speaker 1: gender violence, race, class, queerness, and just the general lawlessness
Speaker 1: of the early Internet. It's a fucking mire and it's
Speaker 1: one I was really interested in. And while I think
Speaker 1: the Internet elected the main character of this story as
Speaker 1: Antoine Dodson, the brother, it's important to note that this
Speaker 1: story was always about more than one person, first and
Speaker 1: foremost Kelly Dodson, who was assaulted, and then her brother
Speaker 1: Antoine Dodson, who came to her aid. Internet history doesn't
Speaker 1: really regard it that way, and I'm going to take
Speaker 1: a look at why in a bit. But it's hard
Speaker 1: to overstate what a gigantic deal this was. In the
Speaker 1: summer of twenty ten. At the time of this recording,
Speaker 1: the Gregory Brothers clip, which is called bed Intruder's Song
Speaker 1: All Caps, three exclamation points, mind You, has one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty five million views on YouTube, and the news clip,
Speaker 1: which was re uploaded two years later, clocks in at
Speaker 1: over eighty four million views. As I record this in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, it's very possible to become an Internet
Speaker 1: character of the day without being cross pollinated into every
Speaker 1: corner of the Internet. There are stories that are thoroughly
Speaker 1: relegated to one platform, Some TikTok scandals never cross over
Speaker 1: into where the old folks are hanging out, and earth
Speaker 1: shattering conflicts from these still active Facebook users in the
Speaker 1: boomer contingency are unlikely to migrate anywhere else. Things weren't
Speaker 1: like this in twenty ten, and the why is a
Speaker 1: little complicated. The BBC predicted that there would be two
Speaker 1: billion people using the Internet by the end of twenty ten.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty four, that number has ballooned to nearly
Speaker 1: five and a half billion current Internet users. The tools
Speaker 1: for viral success are wildly different. Facebook and Tumblr were
Speaker 1: dominant back then, where TikTok creates today's Internet titans with
Speaker 1: a million fallen social media networks in between, and the
Speaker 1: way that stories, clips, and people go viral also works
Speaker 1: very differently now, as we're going to explore in the
Speaker 1: show time and time again. The front half of the
Speaker 1: twenty tens were, for better or worse, driven by organic
Speaker 1: engagement between people, and in the last ten years we've
Speaker 1: seen the world online increasingly shaped by algorithms that show
Speaker 1: us what they think they can profit from sales sure, engagement, yes,
Speaker 1: and your attention and emotional response from what the algorithm
Speaker 1: serves up. I know you don't need me to tell
Speaker 1: you this. We've all watched that Corty Netflix documentary. It's
Speaker 1: an attention economy. Let's keep moving. I say it because
Speaker 1: in twenty ten, a lot of this stuff was still
Speaker 1: pretty uncharted, particularly with how fast these media cycles tend
Speaker 1: to go. The Gregory Brothers had been posting to YouTube
Speaker 1: for about a year when they first saw Antoine Dodson
Speaker 1: after the WAFT forty eight clip was re uploaded from
Speaker 1: the news station's website to YouTube. The brothers claim to
Speaker 1: fame at the time were viral news clips expertly remixed
Speaker 1: into songs. The series was originally called Auto Tune the
Speaker 1: News and was later changed to Songify This, and they
Speaker 1: still do it today. The most recent Gregory Brothers video
Speaker 1: is a songified clip from the recent Amazon Prime moved
Speaker 1: Ricky Staniki about Dix.
Speaker 2: I didn't finish it.
Speaker 1: At this time. The Gregory Brothers had had one previous
Speaker 1: significant success on YouTube, another remix of a famous viral
Speaker 1: video of the day. You might remember this one. It
Speaker 1: was of a very enthusiastic man named Paul Yosemite Bear
Speaker 1: Vasquez reacting to a double rainbow. The Gregory Brothers remix
Speaker 1: sounded like this, Wow, that's.
Speaker 6: A fool rainfall all the way double rainfall. Oh my god,
Speaker 6: Dobo rainfall.
Speaker 1: So at the time bede Intruder dropped, the group's success
Speaker 1: wasn't unprecedented. Bet Intruder was their second big success in
Speaker 1: less than a year, and unlike a lot of social
Speaker 1: media stars, the Gregory Brothers had the talent and consistency
Speaker 1: to remain successful and adapt into today. They were also
Speaker 1: behind a very successful remix of a main character from
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, one of my favorites, Corn Kid, who
Speaker 1: originally appeared on the online series Recess Therapy. Just talking
Speaker 1: about corn for me Iman like.
Speaker 8: Code, what do you like about corn?
Speaker 1: I too love corn Kid. So the Gregory Brothers have
Speaker 1: remained very attuned to who makes a viable internet character,
Speaker 1: But bed Intruder made the Brothers and Antoine Dodson very
Speaker 1: very famous. The first bet Intruder remix video did huge numbers.
Speaker 1: It actually ended up being the most streamed YouTube video
Speaker 1: of twenty ten, closely followed by a Kesha parody and
Speaker 1: an annoying orange video just to remind you of the
Speaker 1: arrow we're in. After that, the Gregory Brothers released a
Speaker 1: full three and a half minute version of the song
Speaker 1: that was for sale on iTunes. This was when iTunes,
Speaker 1: Apple's pay per song platform, was still a pretty viable
Speaker 1: business model, still far less lucrative than physical media, which
Speaker 1: remained a major discussion at this time. But hey, musicians
Speaker 1: are doing even worse with Spotify residuals today, and if
Speaker 1: music distribution online hadn't become this popular, bed Intruder couldn't
Speaker 1: have broken into the mainstream in the way it did.
Speaker 1: The full song was hugely popular on iTunes and even
Speaker 1: broke into the Billboard Hot one hundred, reaching number three
Speaker 1: on the iTunes R at B charts, number fifteen on
Speaker 1: the Pop charts, and number twenty five overall. So the
Speaker 1: Gregory Brothers are talented composers and they're making videos about
Speaker 1: videos using the original subject's likeness and voice before there
Speaker 1: were any common practices online about that. So my knee
Speaker 1: jerk fear was that Antoine Dotson, who spoke to the
Speaker 1: media for free about fending off a man who attempted
Speaker 1: to rape his sister. Kelly never saw a dime for
Speaker 1: the huge viral success that was Bed Intruder. But that's
Speaker 1: not true, the Gregory brothers said in an interview was
Speaker 1: Wired at the time, and Antoine Dotson confirmed to me
Speaker 1: that the iTunes revenue was split between the brothers and
Speaker 1: Antoine fifty to fifty. Michael Gregory explains their reasoning to
Speaker 1: Wired all the way back in twenty ten.
Speaker 8: We're really breaking unintentional singing ground. So we're trying to
Speaker 8: set precedents by making it so that Antoine or whoever
Speaker 8: that artist might be in the future, has a stake
Speaker 8: not only as an artist, but as a co author
Speaker 8: of the song. It's like you said, he wrote the lyrics.
Speaker 8: He's the one who put it out there. What we
Speaker 8: are doing on iTunes and on any other sales, we're
Speaker 8: splitting the revenue after kis through Apple down the middle,
Speaker 8: and that also applies if we ever licensed the song
Speaker 8: for TV or a movie, whatever happens to the song,
Speaker 8: he has a fifty percent writing credit. And we have
Speaker 8: the same agreement with Paul Vasquez, co writer of the
Speaker 8: Double Rainbow song.
Speaker 1: According to Dodson. The Gregory brothers tend to have such
Speaker 1: a good relationship with their viral subjects because of this
Speaker 1: financial arrangement, and that was a subject of discussion online
Speaker 1: at the time. The most recent scandal about an internet
Speaker 1: viral figure never seeing a dime from a heavily monetized
Speaker 1: YouTube upload was the singer Susan Boyle, and this prompted
Speaker 1: tech writers in their early twenty tens to ask creators
Speaker 1: if the people they were pulling from actually got any
Speaker 1: financial kickback. This is a conversation that continues today, particularly
Speaker 1: in an algorithmically fueled ecosystem that still pushes white creators
Speaker 1: to fame over anyone else. And the Gregory brothers are talented,
Speaker 1: but given that their white people in Brooklyn were remixing
Speaker 1: a news broadcast about an attempted rape on a black
Speaker 1: woman in a poor area of Georgia and monetizing it,
Speaker 1: that was a question that needed to be looked at
Speaker 1: more closely. And that's not to say there wasn't any
Speaker 1: criticism of the way that blackness, poverty, and sexual assault
Speaker 1: were all being trivialized by turning it into a song.
Speaker 1: Michael Gregory defended this to Billboard in twenty ten, saying.
Speaker 8: It's taking a terrible situation and making at least something
Speaker 8: positive out of it.
Speaker 1: But the way the Dotsons were presented to the public
Speaker 1: by the media upset others because of the lack of
Speaker 1: control they had on how they were portrayed until they
Speaker 1: were already famous. The news broadcast was through a white
Speaker 1: lens and the parody was through a white lens, and
Speaker 1: some critics call that out veritun Dee Thurston of The
Speaker 1: Onion talk to NPR about how it sat poorly with
Speaker 1: him on All Tech Considered at the time, saying as
Speaker 1: the remix took off, I became increasingly uncomfortable with its
Speaker 1: separation from the underlying situation. A woman was sexually assaulted
Speaker 1: and her brother was rightfully upset. People online seemed to
Speaker 1: be laughing at him and not with him, because he
Speaker 1: wasn't laughing as Dodson fulfilled multiple stereotypes in one short
Speaker 1: news segment, but Thurston notes Antoine Dodson seemed to have
Speaker 1: a vested interest in bending the media narrative to his
Speaker 1: and his family's favor, and not just letting the Internet
Speaker 1: mill roll over him. Thurston continued the creativity unleashed has
Speaker 1: been amazing, and what mitigates my fears of people minimizing
Speaker 1: the gravity of the situation is how Antoine himself has
Speaker 1: responded and taken charge of his own meme. This is
Speaker 1: where I will ask, for the first and not the
Speaker 1: last time, where's Kelly. Kelly Dodson is all but absent
Speaker 1: in the Bed Intruder remix. Both the newscast and the
Speaker 1: song give major pressidence to her brother Antoine. But we'll
Speaker 1: get back to that point. What you need to know
Speaker 1: is that once Bed Intruder was posted, it was fucking over.
Speaker 1: Marching bands were covering this song. Hailey Williams from Paramore
Speaker 1: and guys from punk bands I've never heard of were
Speaker 1: covering this song.
Speaker 7: Well, obviously we have a rapist in Lincoln pot.
Speaker 5: It's running in.
Speaker 4: Your windows, touching your people up gener again, hid Hi Kid.
Speaker 6: And Outs.
Speaker 1: And Yes mocked the Dodson's vocal delivery. It went on
Speaker 1: and on. This story kept going and kept mutating. The
Speaker 1: Gregory Brothers were on the Oscars that year, songifying the
Speaker 1: Big teen Movies of twenty ten. Also, this was the
Speaker 1: year that Anne Hathaway and James Franco hosted the Oscars
Speaker 1: together for some reason. I kind of memory hold that,
Speaker 1: so sorry if I reminded you that happened. It was weird.
Speaker 1: But Antoine Dodson seizes on this sudden burst of fame
Speaker 1: as well. He made a number of appearances during this
Speaker 1: stretch of time, but the most viral were ones where
Speaker 1: he leaned directly into the meme, notably performing the auto
Speaker 1: tune version at the BET Hip Hop Awards in twenty ten,
Speaker 1: right alongside Michael Gregory. Here's a clip justin A crime.
Speaker 9: Was committed on a five hundred block of Webster Drive.
Speaker 6: We have an eyewitness on the scene.
Speaker 7: Now, well, he's climbing a young windows.
Speaker 10: He's sent to your people love trying to write the
Speaker 10: soy y'all needs a hi to dance.
Speaker 7: Antoine Dotson and Michael Gregory real talk for real. I
Speaker 7: know that was messed up.
Speaker 6: They was able to buy in Mama House and get
Speaker 6: him out the project with that song right there.
Speaker 7: I don't know how long.
Speaker 6: They gonna live there, but.
Speaker 7: So go run and tell that homeboy.
Speaker 1: That's host Mike Epps at the end, referencing the fact
Speaker 1: that just three months after bet Intruder went viral, the
Speaker 1: Dodsons were able to move out of the projects with
Speaker 1: the money not just from the song, but merch that
Speaker 1: Antoine sold, featuring his image with slogans from the clip
Speaker 1: we can find you, We've got your T shirt, etc.
Speaker 1: And this goal of monetizing this moment came into focus
Speaker 1: for Antoine within days of the bed Intruder song's release.
Speaker 1: Antoine Dodson was going to school for business and was
Speaker 1: very shrewd about controlling the narrative to his family's benefit.
Speaker 1: From very early on. Less than a week later, he'd
Speaker 1: set up a website called Antoine's World, where he posted
Speaker 1: updates about the Gregory Brothers songs, his merch, and the
Speaker 1: appearances and fundraisers he was holding. He told fans directly
Speaker 1: that money from these endeavors would be going to his
Speaker 1: family and to a juvenile diabetes charity. Unlike a lot
Speaker 1: of the viral stars will be covering on this show,
Speaker 1: Antoine Dodson had staying power, partially because he had an
Speaker 1: interest in staying in the spotlight. He would continue to
Speaker 1: appear in media and TV and film for years after this,
Speaker 1: including a lot of speculation about his sexuality that went
Speaker 1: through a number of unnecessary press cycles between twenty ten
Speaker 1: and twenty eighteen. Here's something. In twenty fourteen and get
Speaker 1: ready for a wild one, there was a pay per
Speaker 1: view celebrity boxing match between Antoine and quote unquote The Intruder.
Speaker 1: It gets weirder. This match was hosted by Kato Kaelin,
Speaker 1: who is like the famous witness who testified at the
Speaker 1: OJ Simpson trial in the nineties. It's a fucking madlib
Speaker 1: of an event. The man who called himself the Intruder,
Speaker 1: a man named Rashad Cooper, gave an interview to al
Speaker 1: dot Com implying that Kelly Dodson had been lying and
Speaker 1: made the entire rape attempt up. Here's that quote. She
Speaker 1: tried to do something I wasn't down for yet, all
Speaker 1: of a sudden she got mad and bipolar and started
Speaker 1: throwing stuff, trying to fight me. So I won't lie.
Speaker 1: I did hop out of that window. A mad woman.
Speaker 1: You don't play with them. Antoine won the boxing match,
Speaker 1: and his son was born two days later. Kelly Dodson
Speaker 1: made no comment on the fight and did not confirm
Speaker 1: that that was, in fact the man who had attempted
Speaker 1: to rape her four years earlier. The last time the
Speaker 1: siblings appeared together in public was in twenty twenty one
Speaker 1: on Judge Jerry Springer, one of those fake court shows
Speaker 1: before Jerry Springer died, where Antoine was suing Kelly for
Speaker 1: seven hundred and fifty dollars over a personal loan. From
Speaker 1: what I could find, this was the first time Kelly
Speaker 1: had made in appearance publicly in years. Here's a clip.
Speaker 6: You're reasonably well known. Yeah, tell me your story, Antwine.
Speaker 10: Well, obviously I need everybody to hat they kids, had
Speaker 10: they wife and had they husbands too, because I was
Speaker 10: showing everybody who owe me some money? Just playing and
Speaker 10: simple from Antwine does it? And I did the hag
Speaker 10: your kids back in twenty ten.
Speaker 6: I made you famous. That's why he's well known.
Speaker 1: Oh, my god, him famous?
Speaker 6: Yea, No, she did not make me fair, Joan.
Speaker 10: I am so sick a tide of my family saying that.
Speaker 10: They say that all the time every time we get
Speaker 10: into an argument when it's about money or finances.
Speaker 6: Is Oh, I made you famous. It was me.
Speaker 10: I'm the victim, and I'm just so tired of carrying
Speaker 10: his victim title.
Speaker 6: I am the victim the whole rah.
Speaker 4: No, I'm the reason you're a famous Do we need
Speaker 4: to play it anywhere else?
Speaker 3: Ya?
Speaker 1: So as the years passed, most of the public seem
Speaker 1: to forget what Kelly is talking about here in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, the traumatic incident that prompted everything all the
Speaker 1: way back in twenty ten, So a decade on Kelly's
Speaker 1: trauma is remembered less and less, and the fixation on
Speaker 1: Antoine Dotson's clip on WAFT forty eight is what's stuck
Speaker 1: in the collective memory. And while the Gregory Brothers would
Speaker 1: continue to have other successes off of auto Tune in
Speaker 1: the news, they would often return to the well of
Speaker 1: Antoine when they would get work out side of YouTube.
Speaker 1: And there's no better example of that than in early
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen when the band composed the theme song to
Speaker 1: The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt for Netflix, with not just the
Speaker 1: same cadence of the Bead Intruder song, but basically the
Speaker 1: same setup. So the clip is of a neighbor of
Speaker 1: the series protagonist, Kimmy, who is a survivor of an
Speaker 1: abusive underground cult run by John Hammett, but the theme
Speaker 1: itself is an auto tune. The news clip this neighbor
Speaker 1: is a black man named Walter Bankston who lives in
Speaker 1: a trailer unknowingly beside this underground bunker, and this character
Speaker 1: tells a local newscaster the following, mister Bankston.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, what had happened was I was out of.
Speaker 6: Grandson.
Speaker 1: So this moment in internet history continued to be really lucrative,
Speaker 1: all while the real story was slowly erased, and that
Speaker 1: erasure is not the fault of either Dodson's sibling. The real,
Speaker 1: detailed story of what happened that day in twenty ten
Speaker 1: was always available. Antoine Dodson spoke in both his sister
Speaker 1: Kelly and his community's defense extensively around the same time
Speaker 1: period that the be et Hip Hop Awards and Tosh
Speaker 1: point zero were happening. So if I already use my
Speaker 1: big old brain to take a guess here, these interviews
Speaker 1: were quickly forgotten because they don't lean into the image
Speaker 1: of the Dodsons that forty eight projected in that video,
Speaker 1: and including details about the attempted rape of Kelly Dodson
Speaker 1: would likely have made the gleeful enjoyment of this song
Speaker 1: seem pretty dismissive. But the interviews were always there. Here's
Speaker 1: Antoine on NPR the week the video went viral.
Speaker 9: What do we need to do as people to keep
Speaker 9: our community safe?
Speaker 6: You know what I'm saying, Like, because nobody's talking about
Speaker 6: in that.
Speaker 9: I mean, the world knows, but here locally in Huntsville
Speaker 9: is like, Okay, it's a joke. Everybody taking it to
Speaker 9: be a joke. It's funny to them. You know what
Speaker 9: I'm saying, I'm making their city look bad. I'm making
Speaker 9: their community look bad.
Speaker 1: And when we come back, I got to speak with
Speaker 1: Kevin Antoine Dodson. Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I am
Speaker 1: a white woman with brown hair. So when I reached
Speaker 1: out to Antoine Dotson, I was not sure what to expect,
Speaker 1: And honestly, I most wanted to speak to Kelly Dodson,
Speaker 1: who had never been centered in a story about her
Speaker 1: reporting and attempted assault. But Kelly has historically resisted the limelight,
Speaker 1: which is an active agency in itself. There's no way
Speaker 1: to contact her online at present. Antoine, however, did reply,
Speaker 1: and we caught up not just about his history as
Speaker 1: an internet celebrity, but about his whole life. So just
Speaker 1: so you're aware, this interview was over two hours long,
Speaker 1: so it's been edited for length and clarity, and I'll
Speaker 1: do my best to fill you in on what Antoine
Speaker 1: and I discussed between clips. On that note, I'm also
Speaker 1: going to place a trigger warning here for child sex
Speaker 1: abuse as well. Here are some of our talks.
Speaker 6: Hey, I'm a Twyna Dawson.
Speaker 5: I became famous from the local integod that I did
Speaker 5: here in Huntsville where my sister was attacked and the
Speaker 5: tutor came into her home.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and that's how the fans know me.
Speaker 1: What is life like for you right now? You're you're
Speaker 1: back in Huntsville for now?
Speaker 5: Up here, it's pretty you know this the South is
Speaker 5: pretty laid back. You know, they got the country by
Speaker 5: the soul cooking. You know what I'm saying. It's no
Speaker 5: paparazza see here. It's not a lot of work for
Speaker 5: entertainment here, so it's pretty laid back.
Speaker 1: There is most of your family still in Huntsville as well?
Speaker 6: No, most of my family is still in Chicago.
Speaker 5: I'm originally from Chicago, and I moved to Huntsville in
Speaker 5: two thousand and four, and most of my family stayed back.
Speaker 5: And I'm the oldest of nine kids. Five of them
Speaker 5: and myself. We moved here in Huntsville with our moms.
Speaker 6: As far as back I can remember, I was probably
Speaker 6: about five or six around that age.
Speaker 5: Well, my mother's mother, she was getting sick and she
Speaker 5: had diabetes, which like gave her gang green.
Speaker 6: So she had to get her legs amputated.
Speaker 5: So of course with that she had to go into
Speaker 5: a nursing home, and so my mama was left out
Speaker 5: there to fend for herself with two kids. So when
Speaker 5: my grandmother went to the nursing home, I remember my
Speaker 5: mama putting packing me and my sister a bag, and
Speaker 5: I remember putting us on the CTA of public transportation
Speaker 5: in Chicago, and she sat down with us and have
Speaker 5: this long like when you get to this house, don't
Speaker 5: touch nothing, don't say nothing. You stay close to me,
Speaker 5: don't break nothing, don't ask for nothing. You know how
Speaker 5: parents do before they they tell you, because this is
Speaker 5: where we're going to be staying, so you don't want
Speaker 5: to you just don't want to do a lot.
Speaker 6: So she gave us this whole list of things of
Speaker 6: not to do.
Speaker 5: And so when I got to the house, but you
Speaker 5: know how you get this eerie feeling about something. Yeah,
Speaker 5: Like I always called it the candy Cane House because
Speaker 5: it was red and white, and it was our big
Speaker 5: Mama and another part of our family, and.
Speaker 6: I just remember it being real eerie, and.
Speaker 5: I walked into the backyard where all the family was
Speaker 5: that outside it was drinking and smoking, loud, a whole
Speaker 5: bunch of folks out there, clowning and stuff.
Speaker 6: So, you know, we being I think I was five,
Speaker 6: but me, oh, you're little, Okay, I was little because
Speaker 6: this is the beginning of all that trauma.
Speaker 1: Once he, his mother and Kelly moved into this pretty
Speaker 1: large communal family situation in Chicago. Kevin That's what I'm
Speaker 1: going to call him, because that's what he usually goes by.
Speaker 1: Antoine is his middle name. Kevin was sexually abused by
Speaker 1: his uncle repeatedly, and like many survivors of child sexual abuse,
Speaker 1: he was afraid and confused and did not report what
Speaker 1: was happening to his mom. He told me that this
Speaker 1: abuse continued for years.
Speaker 5: But yeah, this happened from six years old all the
Speaker 5: way up until I was fourteen when I ran away
Speaker 5: tried to commit suicide.
Speaker 6: Behind it and everything.
Speaker 5: It was because my grandmother is the big my mother
Speaker 5: family was mother for the state of Illinois. When she
Speaker 5: had kids coming in and out. Kids will come in
Speaker 5: and out of the house, different kids.
Speaker 6: And she didn't want them.
Speaker 5: She'd send them back there, send out and do set
Speaker 5: of kids, you know, like that type of house, basically
Speaker 5: a foster hall.
Speaker 6: Okay, Oh yeah, it was bad.
Speaker 5: It was really bad. A lot of things happened. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I tried to commit suicide. The same thing happened to
Speaker 5: my sister, but at the time I didn't know, So
Speaker 5: I didn't know with kelly Ce, I didn't know that
Speaker 5: that was happening to her until we got older. We
Speaker 5: started drinking and conversations bring people bringing up old wounds, right,
Speaker 5: and then I found out.
Speaker 1: Kevin told me that his childhood was marked by abuse
Speaker 1: and attempts to run away, as well as struggling to
Speaker 1: navigate him his own personal sexuality, and that this led
Speaker 1: to depression and hospitalization.
Speaker 5: I found one of my uncle's pills. I took the
Speaker 5: whole bottle in the bathroom. I locked the door, and
Speaker 5: that's why I passed out at and so I woke.
Speaker 6: Up to them knocking up my mother knocking them like Kevin,
Speaker 6: are you okay in there? Like because my first name
Speaker 6: is Kevin. Yeah, So she was like, are you okay? Now?
Speaker 6: Are you okay? In that? So I waking up and
Speaker 6: I'm like.
Speaker 5: Damn, I'm I'm dizzy. My stomach hurt, my head hurt.
Speaker 5: I'm like And so I.
Speaker 6: Opened the door.
Speaker 5: I said, mom, I took all these pills, and so.
Speaker 6: My mama just immediately started freaking out it. She was like,
Speaker 6: oh my god, like, why would you do that?
Speaker 5: Like, no, you got to go to the hospital, and
Speaker 5: so I can tell them I'm getting real dizzy. So
Speaker 5: everybody was like, take him outside on the front porch,
Speaker 5: he needs to get small, which was the worst thing
Speaker 5: that they could have done, because soon as that air
Speaker 5: hit me, I passed out again and I woke up
Speaker 5: in the ambulance.
Speaker 6: I get to a hospital.
Speaker 5: Actually it was the hospital I was born in, Roseland
Speaker 5: Community Hospital.
Speaker 6: So some days had went by and it was like,
Speaker 6: mister Dodson, we're going to have to release you and
Speaker 6: transfer you to another hospital because we've done all we
Speaker 6: can here for you.
Speaker 5: So I'm like, damn, this is we're not thinking that
Speaker 5: they're hitting me to a fucking psych ward.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, I mean again, you're a kid, like, what
Speaker 1: are you how are you supposed to know?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 5: So I'm thinking I'm getting ready to be released. It
Speaker 5: too the Wonderful Land of Oz.
Speaker 6: But I ended up going.
Speaker 5: To the cycle work which was disclosed now but it's
Speaker 5: called Michaelic's Hospital in Chicago. And so I'm there, and
Speaker 5: so I was there for three days. I guess they
Speaker 5: was doing like observation and watching me recover and stuff.
Speaker 5: So like after three days they said, well, they came
Speaker 5: in said, well, mister Dowson, you're being released. So I'm
Speaker 5: thinking I'm being released to go home. And so they
Speaker 5: were saying like we're waiting on your We notified your
Speaker 5: mother and waiting on her to come in. So when
Speaker 5: my mama came in, they didn't tell her that they
Speaker 5: wanted her to sign a release to put to commit me.
Speaker 5: And so my mama said, oh, I'm not doing that.
Speaker 5: I'm not committing my son. And so the nurse said, man,
Speaker 5: we just actually we was doing it out of courtesy,
Speaker 5: but we really don't need your permission because just have
Speaker 5: to go in. Really, yeah, they didn't need my consent.
Speaker 5: I guess the fact that I tried to commit suicide
Speaker 5: and did back then there. It's called DCFS, the Department
Speaker 5: of Children and Family Services, Okay, and so yeah, so
Speaker 5: they didn't need her permission, so they took me to admit, well,
Speaker 5: they really feel more crazy, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 5: Like I told them what happened. I explained to them like, hey,
Speaker 5: I only did this shit because I hurt somebody and
Speaker 5: I'm being hurt in the same way and then it's
Speaker 5: from my family. But nobody believed me, and the hospital
Speaker 5: did not believe me so much so that like when
Speaker 5: I would act out. You know how we kids are
Speaker 5: when they when you don't believe a kid, they begin
Speaker 5: to act out. Yeah, so I began to act down
Speaker 5: and stuff, and they will put me a straight jacket,
Speaker 5: shoot me in my ass next, so I couldn't move
Speaker 5: like it was. It was a I'm telling you, this
Speaker 5: ship is very traumatic, you know. It's just it was
Speaker 5: really bad. But eventually, after being there for like two
Speaker 5: or three months, I realized In the last month, I
Speaker 5: told myself, now I gotta fake it until I make
Speaker 5: it because me clown in here fighting everybody is not
Speaker 5: going to keep me here.
Speaker 6: So I learned that, Okay, I'm gonna be more calm.
Speaker 5: As soon as I get out of here and I
Speaker 5: get to my mama house, I'm running away.
Speaker 6: I had created this whole plan in my head.
Speaker 1: Once he was released, Kevin did soon run away from
Speaker 1: the house, only to be returned by the police after
Speaker 1: not being able to connect with his godmother. After this,
Speaker 1: he says that the abuse from his uncle escalated and
Speaker 1: that he was also trafficked to friends of his uncle
Speaker 1: as a teenager. This was in addition to his sometimes
Speaker 1: needing to buy his own food when the matriarch of
Speaker 1: the house wouldn't let him and Kelly eat regular meals.
Speaker 1: And it's here where Antoine comes into the mix.
Speaker 5: Yes, so in my mind all is going on with
Speaker 5: my uncles. This is how I'm providing for myself to eat.
Speaker 5: So when you're in a situation like that, you become
Speaker 5: very creative. You started creating. For one I had to
Speaker 5: create a hustle. I had to make sure that when
Speaker 5: my grandmother and them said that we couldn't eat, I
Speaker 5: had to find a way to eat. So me and
Speaker 5: my cousin because they did my cousins like that, and
Speaker 5: there it was a lot of us cousins. So what
Speaker 5: we would do is like what we had this twenty
Speaker 5: four hour grocery store. So we would do we would
Speaker 5: set up shop in the basement and we'll say, hey,
Speaker 5: we're going to send you to go and get the
Speaker 5: snacks and the stuff, and we're gonna be on the lookout.
Speaker 5: So that's how we used to do it. We all
Speaker 5: used to take turns not to mention, like when I
Speaker 5: wanted to. I created Antoine in my head, like when
Speaker 5: my uncle used to get on top of me and stuff.
Speaker 5: I would go places in my mind because my family
Speaker 5: called me Kevin. But I knew that Kevin came with
Speaker 5: a lot of pain, a lot of trauma. He was
Speaker 5: very angry, would snap off in a heartbeat. So I
Speaker 5: had to create a personality outside of that that brought
Speaker 5: me hope and you know, joy and peace. Like yeah,
Speaker 5: And so I created this this Antoine Dots character and
Speaker 5: Antoine Dice and he was fun He was funny.
Speaker 6: He made everybody laugh. You know. I had to.
Speaker 5: Create this person to get out of this darkness. And
Speaker 5: this is why people know me today as Antoine Docton.
Speaker 5: He still lives in me and everybody say, like, oh,
Speaker 5: Antolia's so funny and stuff like that. You have to
Speaker 5: create this person out of pain. I didn't create this
Speaker 5: person because I loved him, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: I didn't create this person to be a content creator.
Speaker 5: I created this person.
Speaker 6: To escape reality. I thought Antoine was a celebrity. I
Speaker 6: thought that, even from a kid.
Speaker 5: Like I would walk down the street and have my
Speaker 5: fake bodyguards behind me. You know, I would do my
Speaker 5: head like I do my old hair. I just really created.
Speaker 6: This person to be this funny, comical person.
Speaker 1: Right. So finally, Kevin ran away to live with his
Speaker 1: godmother for a few years to escape this cycle of abuse,
Speaker 1: and the first person he told that he was leaving
Speaker 1: for good was his younger sister, Kelly.
Speaker 6: We just got mistreated a lot.
Speaker 5: They treated us so bad, and it got to the
Speaker 5: point where I had talked to Kelly when I was fourteen,
Speaker 5: and I said, Kelly, I can't do this no more.
Speaker 5: I said, Kelly, I can't do this no more. I'm
Speaker 5: tired of taking care of kids. I'm tired of going
Speaker 5: through this shit with this house. I'm tired of having
Speaker 5: to go still to eat. I'm so tired of I'm
Speaker 5: just tired of everything. And I just up and left,
Speaker 5: up and left and I never looked back.
Speaker 1: And around his eighteenth birthday, a family member reached out
Speaker 1: to Kevin, Kelly, their mother, and their siblings, and suggested
Speaker 1: a move to Huntsville, Alabama, where she lived.
Speaker 5: Because my mother, when I was in Chicago, my mama
Speaker 5: used to go to school for hair, and so they
Speaker 5: didn't want to be bothered with.
Speaker 6: Me and my sister.
Speaker 5: So after school they would make me and my sister
Speaker 5: walk to my mother's castel line. And that's how we
Speaker 5: learned how to do hair. Yeah, So from eighteen to
Speaker 5: twenty four in Huntsville, that's what.
Speaker 6: I was doing. I was doing hair. I was fried,
Speaker 6: dying land head.
Speaker 5: To the side, like I was making money doing that
Speaker 5: for everybody. And so, and I was in college for
Speaker 5: cosmetology and this is in management at Virginia College in Huntsville.
Speaker 1: And then it happened. The day before the assault in
Speaker 1: twenty ten, Kevin and Kelly had gotten into a petty
Speaker 1: sibling argument which led to Kelly punching Kevin and him
Speaker 1: leaving the house in annoyance. The whole family had just
Speaker 1: bought a bunch of frozen meat that was in Kelly's freezer,
Speaker 1: and so the story really begins when Kevin returns for
Speaker 1: his meat the next day.
Speaker 5: And so the next day, I'm laying on my freend
Speaker 5: couch and I'm like, damn, I forget I got them
Speaker 5: steaks over there. So I'll way back over to Kelly house.
Speaker 5: I walked right in the house. I didn't say shit
Speaker 5: to nobody. I just walked in her kitchen. And you
Speaker 5: know she had those cheap dollar store frying pans that
Speaker 5: burn in a heartbeat.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So I'm cooking the.
Speaker 5: Steaks on her stove in her kitchen and the gilly
Speaker 5: is burning. It's smoking the house out. So I put
Speaker 5: the window in the kitchen. I cracked the window so
Speaker 5: it can ventilate the smoke. Now I got my hair
Speaker 5: just like how this is.
Speaker 6: So I'm taking my.
Speaker 5: Hair down, like what the hell are you.
Speaker 6: Doing in my house? And say the back said girl,
Speaker 6: I was yesterday news. I'm over that shit. You don't
Speaker 6: gotta apologize, girl, fuck you. Let me take my hair
Speaker 6: down and eat my damn steak.
Speaker 5: So I'm taking my hair down and asked her how
Speaker 5: the red bandana came about? Because my hair I had
Speaker 5: just took.
Speaker 6: My head down.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 6: So I fell asleep on Kelly Couch.
Speaker 5: I fell asleep on Kelly Counch and I heard I
Speaker 5: was talking to my Auntie in Florida and we was
Speaker 5: on Facebook. I had made some crazy ass poster. We
Speaker 5: talking shit and she's like, you ain't no celebrity. So
Speaker 5: I'm like, maybe you know almost in my bodyguard. They
Speaker 5: don't play that shit about me. They're gonna come and
Speaker 5: get you. They're gonna find you in Florida. This is
Speaker 5: the conversation. This happened hours before the attack. I remember
Speaker 5: this was like one one o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 6: Okay, But but as I'm.
Speaker 5: Laying down, I keep laying the phone on my chest,
Speaker 5: and when the phone vibrated on my chest, I lift
Speaker 5: it up and I text on Auntie. Well, I guess
Speaker 5: I fell into a deep sleep and I started hearing
Speaker 5: the screaming and Holland in.
Speaker 6: My sleep, and I'm like, what the hell?
Speaker 5: So I opened my eyes and the screams it's still continuing.
Speaker 5: So I'm like, what the fuck. It's pitch dark. The
Speaker 5: only thing that's going is the TV. And you know,
Speaker 5: back in those days, we had the DVD.
Speaker 6: DVD players, and you know, when you don't play a
Speaker 6: DVD after so long.
Speaker 5: You know how TikTok logo bounce on the screen d
Speaker 5: I did, which gave a little.
Speaker 6: Light yeah in the room. Okay, So I jumped up immediately.
Speaker 5: I'm hearing her stream, and I'm seeing my other two
Speaker 5: sisters and my niece and my mother in the hallway.
Speaker 6: They out, They freaking out so bad I'm talking about
Speaker 6: it was I was the only mail in the house.
Speaker 6: It was so bad. So I bust open the door
Speaker 6: and I seen a.
Speaker 5: Silhouette because the street light had shined in her window
Speaker 5: and so you could see the silhouette. I could see
Speaker 5: her silhouette on the ground, and I could see the
Speaker 5: silhouette of a man on top of her, looking like
Speaker 5: he had his hands around her neck.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: At that time, I kept really long. I keep long,
Speaker 5: thinking that were growing them now. So I just automatically
Speaker 5: took all my nails and I dug them in his shoulder,
Speaker 5: and I snatched them and pulled them off and swung
Speaker 5: them into the hallway. And that's when he did this
Speaker 5: little basketball move and went under my arm and ran
Speaker 5: in the kitchen.
Speaker 6: Remind you, we're on the second floor.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I'm not thinking that he is jumping out
Speaker 5: of a window.
Speaker 6: I'm thinking he is gonna go get a weapon. We
Speaker 6: all get it under the guy today. So I go
Speaker 6: in the kitchen. I'm like, y'all, go in the room.
Speaker 6: Go in the room, lock the boors, call the police.
Speaker 5: So I'm getting ready to go into the kitchen, but
Speaker 5: I realized that my other sister has been trying to
Speaker 5: escape out of the apartment. So I'm like, oh my god,
Speaker 5: now she's stuck here. So I grab her and I
Speaker 5: take her in the other room and I get on
Speaker 5: the phone and call the police. I said, there is
Speaker 5: somebody in his house. I'm in the house with a
Speaker 5: whole bunch of screaming and hollering freaked out women and
Speaker 5: girls and everybody freaked out.
Speaker 6: And they was like, well, we're on.
Speaker 5: The phone with your other sister right now, but we
Speaker 5: can't be in the phone with both of y'all.
Speaker 6: I said, well, you can get off the phone with me,
Speaker 6: stay on the phone and try to comfort her because
Speaker 6: they're freaking out.
Speaker 1: And so at this point, everyone still thinks that he's
Speaker 1: in the house, but he's actually jumped out the window
Speaker 1: and no one knows it yet. Okay, that's so, I
Speaker 1: mean it and it's the middle of.
Speaker 6: The night, right two o'clock in the morning, two thirty morning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 5: Okay, so we see the police. The police pull up,
Speaker 5: but they didn't pull up with no lights, no nothing.
Speaker 6: All they got. All you see is a bunch of flashlights. Okay,
Speaker 6: going around. So that was my chance.
Speaker 5: So I opened the door. I said, Jade, and you're safe.
Speaker 5: I said, stay here, you're safe. I'm going to go
Speaker 5: let the offices in.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I have to walk past the kitchen to get to
Speaker 5: the front door.
Speaker 6: So I opened the door. I said, he's in the kitchen.
Speaker 5: Oh okay, get there, motherfucking m.
Speaker 6: They go in the kitchen and come to find out
Speaker 6: the window is wide open. I prepared myself to die
Speaker 6: that night because I knew I.
Speaker 5: Had to protect my sisters, and people don't understand the
Speaker 5: feeling that you get when you're preparing to to die.
Speaker 5: I knew that he had with that to get a
Speaker 5: weapon or anything like that, because it's just not registering
Speaker 5: that this dude had jumped out the whole window. And
Speaker 5: I blame myself for it, because remember I told you
Speaker 5: I was cooking. I had left the stack window open.
Speaker 5: He used the garden to see the garbage can to
Speaker 5: get in the window.
Speaker 1: Right. How is how is how is Kelly at this?
Speaker 1: I mean, because she also has to like protect her daughter,
Speaker 1: she was attacked. How was she in those moments?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 5: I had mad and my sister she is She's a
Speaker 5: true She's a street girl. She is a hooded girl.
Speaker 5: So when I see the fear in her, and everybody
Speaker 5: just shaped it profusely, like it was so I had
Speaker 5: never seen my family that scared in my life, and
Speaker 5: I just.
Speaker 6: Thaked the police.
Speaker 5: I was just so happy. I was like, thank y'all
Speaker 5: for coming to say my family and stuff like that.
Speaker 5: And they escorted us off. But you know, I'm a
Speaker 5: I watched for Rigid Files.
Speaker 6: I watched first forty eight. I said, I said, I
Speaker 6: got some skin.
Speaker 5: You know, I started, baby shit, I'm like, I got
Speaker 5: skinned under, I got his skins under my nails.
Speaker 6: He like his.
Speaker 5: T shirt in the house and the T shirt was
Speaker 5: wet from his sweat. So I'm like, I got t shirt.
Speaker 5: Figure prison off from the window still, And so I went,
Speaker 5: you know, back in those days, we used the Yellow Pages. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so I'm sitting there going through the yellow Pages trying
Speaker 5: to find an investigatorm.
Speaker 6: You teckt his nud I went and straight to take them.
Speaker 6: I was up that hole.
Speaker 5: They escorted us off the property at about threeter four o'clock.
Speaker 6: Okay. So we all go to the house that I
Speaker 6: was staying at at the time.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 5: And so I'm sitting there going through the yellow fagers,
Speaker 5: looking for an investigator.
Speaker 6: Looking for an investigator.
Speaker 3: Finally I'm calling everybody and one man and he called
Speaker 3: me back and he was like, hey, oh my god,
Speaker 3: I heard your the voicemail, and I want to come
Speaker 3: and get the You don't have to worry about no
Speaker 3: money or nothing like that.
Speaker 5: I want to come and get the evidence. I said, yes,
Speaker 5: come on, I meet you at the apartment. So later
Speaker 5: on that day, remind you I was calling local newspeople too,
Speaker 5: because I'm like, I just cannot rest, you know what
Speaker 5: I'm saying, until this gets handled.
Speaker 6: But nobody's answering me from WFF.
Speaker 5: So when I get to the house the investigator who
Speaker 5: was up now at the time of the investigator pulling up,
Speaker 5: now the neighborhood is everybody upset. Now everybody's saying like, oh,
Speaker 5: this ain't happening to you. Y'all got here, y'all the
Speaker 5: trouble make y'all bringing this dropping to the neighborhood. So
Speaker 5: I'm arguing back and forth with the neighbors. So as
Speaker 5: that is all this all this is happening at the
Speaker 5: exact same time I'm arguing with the neighbors, I got
Speaker 5: the detective pulling up with the local news station, and
Speaker 5: I got the church bus telling me, hey, here's a flyer,
Speaker 5: which the paper I had.
Speaker 8: In my hand.
Speaker 5: They like, here's the fire for you to go to church.
Speaker 5: You know, you can bring the kids and stuff like
Speaker 5: all this is going on.
Speaker 1: So how how did the local news find out who? Like,
Speaker 1: how did they find out?
Speaker 5: The detective was cool with Elizabeth Gentle And I guess
Speaker 5: he said, hey, this is a story that this dude
Speaker 5: is like he owned one, like you know, I was
Speaker 5: you know, when I talk, I speak with my body expression,
Speaker 5: you know what I'm saying, you know, And so I
Speaker 5: guess he felt that and he heard my voicemail and
Speaker 5: he like, oh, yeah, you might want to cover this story.
Speaker 5: So she's coming with a white So while I'm arguing
Speaker 5: with the neighbor and Elizabeth walking up to me, and
Speaker 5: she's like and so do you want to say anything
Speaker 5: about what happened last night?
Speaker 6: So and the lady.
Speaker 5: Still talking shit on the side, So I look, I said, yeah, hell,
Speaker 5: obviously I wasn't talking to to be truthfully honest, I
Speaker 5: was talking in response to the neighbor.
Speaker 6: So the camera was on.
Speaker 5: It was so easy for me to be like, well, obviously,
Speaker 5: when you get through running yo mouth, y'all need to
Speaker 5: hide your kids. How'd your wife and hid your husbins too?
Speaker 5: Because they're greating everybody out here. Because what people don't
Speaker 5: know is the very next day that same person tried
Speaker 5: to break into another person's house and do the very
Speaker 5: same thing, only.
Speaker 6: She had a boy there who had a gun.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a question. That's a thing that I mean,
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask you. I'd love to talk to
Speaker 1: Kelly at some point as well, because it's like there's
Speaker 1: so many different versions of who this person was, what
Speaker 1: his relationship was to everybody, like in your from from
Speaker 1: where you're coming from, like who who? Who was it?
Speaker 5: I'm going to say I only said this a couple
Speaker 5: of times because I felt like it really didn't matter,
Speaker 5: But now that I'm older, it does matter. So a
Speaker 5: couple of days before. Remind you, my sister had just
Speaker 5: moved in this apartment.
Speaker 6: She wasn't even there a month. Okay, So but a
Speaker 6: person that we had.
Speaker 5: Already knew that was out there had came and knocked
Speaker 5: on my sister door and said, you know, they've been
Speaker 5: talking about running in your shit. They said, you you
Speaker 5: booming too hard, like you move into hard, you push
Speaker 5: in too much weight, and stuff like that, like they
Speaker 5: talked about coming in here robbing y'all or whatever. So
Speaker 5: of course nobody is paying attention to nothing like that
Speaker 5: because you look at it is like, oh, this is
Speaker 5: some hate and shit, not thinking that it's going to
Speaker 5: actually happen, because a couple of days later after that visit,
Speaker 5: it really did happen.
Speaker 1: Kevin admits he can't prove who he Kelly or anyone
Speaker 1: suspected was the man who assaulted her, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: a question. The public had a lot of interest in
Speaker 1: at the time as it was, but he and his
Speaker 1: sister's lives changed pretty immediately once the news clip aired.
Speaker 6: It A benefit almost destroyed us. I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 1: What is that experience, like when do you start to
Speaker 1: realize like this is a this is a thing.
Speaker 6: Okay.
Speaker 5: So after I did the view with Elizabeth Gentles because
Speaker 5: that was in the morning time, yes, And so later
Speaker 5: on that night it aired on local TV, and so
Speaker 5: everybody was hitting me up on Facebook and text me
Speaker 5: and they're like, oh, I just see your interview on
Speaker 5: the news. Boy, that's crazy. Is it bore you crazy?
Speaker 5: Didn look and I'm like, I don't find this shit.
Speaker 6: Funny, Like what is funny about it? You know what
Speaker 6: I'm saying, Like.
Speaker 5: This is still fresh for y'all, still scared, you know,
Speaker 5: still looking over our shoulders, not to mention the endless
Speaker 5: nightmare that I had to go through with my family,
Speaker 5: them having dreams about them coming in. You gotta be
Speaker 5: blocking all the doors and the windows, and like it
Speaker 5: changed our life. So it aired that night, so I'm like, okay, cool,
Speaker 5: it's cool. And then somebody hit me up and was like, oh,
Speaker 5: they put it on YouTube. You got three hundred and
Speaker 5: sixteen views.
Speaker 6: I'm like, wait, what three hundred and sixty views. I'm like, damn,
Speaker 6: people really watching me like that.
Speaker 5: So I'm on YouTube, I'm watching it, and the next
Speaker 5: thing i know, I'm watching it.
Speaker 6: It's five thousand views.
Speaker 5: Ten thousand views, fifty thousand views, five hundred thousand views.
Speaker 5: I said, oh my god, like, it is so many
Speaker 5: people watching this shit, Like yeah.
Speaker 6: But why you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: Then all of a sudden, I started getting people and
Speaker 5: boxing me. They were saying like, Hey, I.
Speaker 6: Want to bring you to my.
Speaker 5: Can you come up making appearance here? We'll pay you,
Speaker 5: We'll set you up in hotels and stuff. So I'm thinking, like,
Speaker 5: what the fuck is going on? Like I'm so confused
Speaker 5: as like what is happening because this is all has
Speaker 5: happened in one day. So I'm like, so I'm like,
Speaker 5: what is going I'm like freaking out.
Speaker 6: And then everybody.
Speaker 5: I had a couple of people reaching out to me
Speaker 5: trying to manage me and stuff like that, and so
Speaker 5: I was like this one person had hit me up
Speaker 5: and was like, if you cannot meet your manager, if
Speaker 5: you can't meet a person in person and sit down
Speaker 5: and have dinner or coffee or lunch with them, then
Speaker 5: they shouldn't be a manager.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And so I was like, damn. So I ended
Speaker 6: up meeting with.
Speaker 5: This one particular guy who which was Richard figure Rover,
Speaker 5: my first manager, and we went to a coffee shop,
Speaker 5: and he was like, look over the place in Huntsville.
Speaker 5: And so he was like, I want to represent you.
Speaker 5: You're everywhere, everybody talking about you. I think you need
Speaker 5: the proper management. Not to mention that he was going
Speaker 5: to the projects looking for me and stuff, trying to
Speaker 5: find me because he felt like.
Speaker 1: Where did he come from? Like where was he based?
Speaker 5: He was already based in Huntsville. See, these are the
Speaker 5: people who, uh, these are the people who was like
Speaker 5: managing Naomi Campbell and stuff like that. Naomi Campbell's old
Speaker 5: manager who was best Boat. She was born in Huntsville
Speaker 5: and so she was a supermodel back in her day.
Speaker 5: And so of course she the one who discovered Naomi
Speaker 5: did actually Christians.
Speaker 6: First photos and all these people.
Speaker 5: So it was it was a no brainer to go
Speaker 5: with a person who was already familiar with management.
Speaker 1: How soon after the clip airing does all of that?
Speaker 1: How is it pretty instantaneous?
Speaker 6: It was immediately.
Speaker 5: It was like when I did the interview that morning
Speaker 5: and with the investigator, by twelve o'clock that same night,
Speaker 5: I was already being talked about. And so the next
Speaker 5: day that's when I started getting everybody hitting me up.
Speaker 5: And they loved the video and wanted me to come
Speaker 5: and make appearances and stuff like that, and the song
Speaker 5: had not been created yet. This is still I was, yeah,
Speaker 5: I was already huged for the song. And so when
Speaker 5: they did I guess the Gregory Brothers they did a.
Speaker 6: Clip of the song, and I was mad. I'm not
Speaker 6: gonna lie. I was mad than the motherfucker because I
Speaker 6: thought I thought that they were making fun, you know,
Speaker 6: because we're still traumatized, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: It was just all in a couple of days time.
Speaker 5: I think the clip came out like a week later, okay.
Speaker 6: And they had such.
Speaker 5: A good response to it, like a heavy response. They
Speaker 5: came to they said, hey, we want to create a
Speaker 5: whole song.
Speaker 6: You know what I'm saying. We want to make should
Speaker 6: you get compensated.
Speaker 5: We want to split the split everything fifty to fifty.
Speaker 5: And we went into contract and they did the whole song.
Speaker 5: And once that song came out, better to to became
Speaker 5: a life of its own.
Speaker 1: We were going to take a quick break and be
Speaker 1: back with Kevin Antoine Dodson after this. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: sixteenth minute. Here is part two of my interview with
Speaker 1: Kevin Antoine Dodson. It's not like there's really anyone to
Speaker 1: turn to to be like, well, this is how it's done,
Speaker 1: Like you kind of have to improvise as you go, right,
Speaker 1: Like there's no.
Speaker 5: Right and that's what And that's the hard time that
Speaker 5: I have because I just did a video just recently
Speaker 5: that went viral, and they still talking about they said
Speaker 5: that virul, that video go virul every other day. But
Speaker 5: they were saying like, oh, he didn't take his lemons
Speaker 5: and make lemonade. But what people don't understand that I
Speaker 5: was the first viral person to.
Speaker 6: Go viral like that. So they didn't know how to
Speaker 6: market me. They and I had so many networks. They
Speaker 6: would tell me like, we don't know what to do
Speaker 6: with you. This has like never happened before. We don't
Speaker 6: know how to market you. We don't know where to
Speaker 6: place you.
Speaker 5: All I know is that everybody wants you, but we
Speaker 5: don't know what to do with you. And after hearing that, hell,
Speaker 5: I didn't even know what to do with myself at
Speaker 5: the time, right, But they swear people sweat up and
Speaker 5: down like they act like I had the guide.
Speaker 6: To thing and I didn't. We did not know what
Speaker 6: to do.
Speaker 5: So when it all boils down, it was like we
Speaker 5: can no longer go to Kelly's house because like fans
Speaker 5: would pull up, they would be out there waiting for
Speaker 5: hours like we had because we were still cool with
Speaker 5: the neighbors, and the neighbors. They was getting upset. They're like, man,
Speaker 5: it's chaos out here, like all these people pulling up
Speaker 5: and droves. You had people flying from flying from other
Speaker 5: cities and states. You had people driving in coming to
Speaker 5: that apartment I'm talking about. It was like a museum
Speaker 5: to them. So I sat with myself and I said,
Speaker 5: you know what, I can make something out of it.
Speaker 5: If these people are asking me to come here and
Speaker 5: there for some money, I can move us out of
Speaker 5: this situation. So I'm telling my family this year, and
Speaker 5: they're like, no, I don't think you should do it.
Speaker 5: I think this is dangerous and stuff like that. I'm like, y'all,
Speaker 5: I don't care what y'all say.
Speaker 6: I'm finna do it. I'm finna take these trips.
Speaker 5: I'm finna sign this contract with this manager because I
Speaker 5: feel like they can help me and put this into perspective.
Speaker 6: They can help.
Speaker 5: Organize I don't know what I'm doing right, so and
Speaker 5: that's how that happened. So I just went on and
Speaker 5: start doing my thing.
Speaker 1: How did Kelly feel about that at the time?
Speaker 6: How?
Speaker 1: Yeah, how are you? Because it's like you guys have
Speaker 1: to navigate this together as things keep going. How is
Speaker 1: she dealing with it? How does she feel like? Did
Speaker 1: she have different instincts from you? Or Yeah?
Speaker 5: If you pay attention to the beginning of all that,
Speaker 5: me and Kelly was traveling together, we had did toss
Speaker 5: point oh together, We was doing videos together.
Speaker 6: We were doing all types of stuff together.
Speaker 5: But her boyfriend at the time convinced her, like, they're
Speaker 5: making fun of y'all.
Speaker 6: They're not laughing with y'all. They laughing at y'all.
Speaker 5: And and at the time he had a little money,
Speaker 5: you know what I'm saying, So it was easy for
Speaker 5: her to.
Speaker 6: Say, Yeah, I'm a ride with this dude. And she
Speaker 6: rode with this dude.
Speaker 5: And I started traveling by myself and she went on
Speaker 5: with her dude and Mama, I mean them, they didn't
Speaker 5: really have nowhere to go. My other siblings and stuff
Speaker 5: didn't have nowhere to go. So I would not stay
Speaker 5: and work. And when I made my first check, I
Speaker 5: put them in the house.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, because I was seeing that coverage from like
Speaker 1: August of that year where I think you posted that.
Speaker 1: You know that there's like you have this huge hit
Speaker 1: on Itune, but you still live in the projects and
Speaker 1: there's this like dissonance to what's going on. So from
Speaker 1: your perspective, it's like, capitalize on the moment and improve
Speaker 1: the families.
Speaker 6: Right right, And that's what I did.
Speaker 1: Okay, I mean that makes total sense. So okay, so
Speaker 1: now you are making I mean, does Bene Intruder kind
Speaker 1: of become your full time living at that point?
Speaker 6: Ah? Yeah, Oh my god. I couldn't go nowhere. I
Speaker 6: couldn't do nothing, Like.
Speaker 5: It just became everything was about being into every conversation
Speaker 5: I had, everything that was going on, was making deals,
Speaker 5: was getting on the airplane.
Speaker 6: Was living in hotels.
Speaker 5: See, I didn't get me a place to stay right away,
Speaker 5: because now at this time, I'm traveling a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I'm not in the I'm not staying in it. I mean,
Speaker 5: Huntsville no longer did two days, so it's easy for
Speaker 5: me to either go stay at my manager's house or
Speaker 5: go lay on my mama's couch. And then I'm back
Speaker 5: on the plane.
Speaker 6: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: So yeah, n In truly became my whole life for
Speaker 5: two years. See what people failed to realize with me
Speaker 5: and Kelly when I knew the trauma.
Speaker 6: Trauma happened.
Speaker 5: Like I explained, trauma has happened all our lives, so
Speaker 5: we know how to go through some shit, get back up,
Speaker 5: thus ourselves again, off and try again.
Speaker 6: So it was never the It was never getting over
Speaker 6: the trauma.
Speaker 5: It was the fact of, you know, having a nightmares
Speaker 5: here at seeing screaming out of her sleep, seeing her
Speaker 5: daughter scream out of her sleep, her mama, screaming out
Speaker 5: of my mama, screaming out of her sleep, my sister.
Speaker 6: It was going through that and how.
Speaker 5: To balance that all out because we're not used to
Speaker 5: they say that.
Speaker 6: Everybody kept saying like, y'all need some serious counseling. You
Speaker 6: know what I'm saying. In my mind at the time, it's.
Speaker 5: Like, how could you talk to somebody who don't know you?
Speaker 5: You know what I'm saying, How could you you know
Speaker 5: which right now?
Speaker 6: Man? You talking? Which is very therapeutic for me.
Speaker 5: Like I feel like I'm getting all this out because
Speaker 5: I rarely talk about the life from Chicago because everybody
Speaker 5: is so focused on twenty ten on up and now
Speaker 5: since so much time has passed by and now everybody
Speaker 5: is asking, like who is Antoine Dosson? We want to
Speaker 5: know more about Antoine Dowson and I have been in
Speaker 5: conversations with Netflix Lifetime because and I don't want to
Speaker 5: give too many details about my life because I would
Speaker 5: hate to wake up one day and see somebody that
Speaker 5: did a movie or or.
Speaker 1: Right without your consent.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, about a story because even though it's trauma,
Speaker 5: it's trauma.
Speaker 6: My life story is good as hell. Kelly life story
Speaker 6: is good as hell.
Speaker 5: And I'm telling you it's going to make somebody a
Speaker 5: lot of money if they get it right right, because
Speaker 5: the narrative was, I don't know if you remember, but
Speaker 5: the narrative was, this was a setup for the same
Speaker 5: we did this to become famous, Like they really thought
Speaker 5: that we that this was like some type of skit
Speaker 5: and that was another thing that we had to fight,
Speaker 5: and that shit pissed Kelly off.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well yeah, because it's like that's just again discounting
Speaker 1: this traumatic, violent incident, like that's oh, that makes me
Speaker 1: so mad. I do remember that being presented, and I
Speaker 1: don't know. I went back yesterday and today and like,
Speaker 1: watch the original clip, and there's so much that I
Speaker 1: think a lot of it is because it didn't end
Speaker 1: up in the song, but like the more upsetting parts
Speaker 1: of the clip, like the scene of the crime. Like
Speaker 1: there's so much included in that report and it's just
Speaker 1: boiled down to these couple of quotes.
Speaker 5: Right, And see, nobody knew that I talked that, We
Speaker 5: talked to WAFL.
Speaker 6: We was out there for.
Speaker 5: Ours talking back and forth, arguing with everybody, like this
Speaker 5: went on for hours with.
Speaker 6: Investigators and everything.
Speaker 5: But they, you know how we do in the industry,
Speaker 5: they shortened all the clips and that's what she got.
Speaker 1: How did the investigation? Did the investigation ever resolve?
Speaker 6: As a time?
Speaker 5: As the time went on and then I began to
Speaker 5: work and stuff like that, I can honestly say I
Speaker 5: did kind of drop the ball with the investigation because
Speaker 5: now I'm trying to make this money.
Speaker 6: I'm trying to get us out of the situation.
Speaker 5: I'm trying to because none of us, you know, we
Speaker 5: never really had shit in life, so I was trying
Speaker 5: to get something for them.
Speaker 6: Even if he never got caught.
Speaker 5: I wanted to make sure that I had something for
Speaker 5: us when all this bore down, And yeah, I dropped,
Speaker 5: We dropped the ball with that.
Speaker 1: I mean, did it ever feel like during those early
Speaker 1: years that like you were, I mean that there was
Speaker 1: like inherent like racism, inherent homophobia to the way that
Speaker 1: you were being treated by the media.
Speaker 6: Yeah, oh my god, I'm sold.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, let's talk.
Speaker 5: About that, because you know, I was I've always been
Speaker 5: known for hair and shoes.
Speaker 6: You know, I used to get my.
Speaker 5: Hair pressed out and where wigs and we back then,
Speaker 5: that was not popular.
Speaker 6: They did not want that.
Speaker 5: I had one person who wanted me to be trans,
Speaker 5: like they wanted to put me on the trans side
Speaker 5: of things, and I was like, no, I'm not trans.
Speaker 5: I'm just a limited, flamboyant boy who liked law mail,
Speaker 5: long hare. I like to be a pretty boy. But
Speaker 5: I know that I am a man.
Speaker 6: So they when I did get out here and work
Speaker 6: and stuff, they did not want the long hair. They
Speaker 6: did not want the long nails, they didn't want the
Speaker 6: flamboyant antoine.
Speaker 5: They were not rocking. Fast forward today, you see all
Speaker 5: these men on the Internet and wigs making a hell
Speaker 5: of a lot of money, and it is approved everybody.
Speaker 6: Uh, what's the word that I'm looking for. It's accepted.
Speaker 5: Everybody is accepting it, and I feel like I'm the
Speaker 5: blueprint of that.
Speaker 1: To this day. Kevin has a good relationship with the
Speaker 1: Gregory Brothers. You mentioned that when his mother passed away
Speaker 1: several years ago, the brothers helped him pay for the funeral.
Speaker 1: But what I found was interesting were Kevin's reflections on
Speaker 1: how things have changed online since he became prominent in
Speaker 1: twenty ten, particularly as it pertains to perception and compensation.
Speaker 5: Well, I see that now do you remember the me
Speaker 5: too movement and stuff like that? See, now it had
Speaker 5: became open because if in twenty ten, will you tell
Speaker 5: somebody that you got raped or sexually started.
Speaker 6: Like, don't tell that. Oh no, my god, don't don't
Speaker 6: don't say that. Don't do that.
Speaker 5: Now you got Diddy being exposed, You got all these
Speaker 5: different celebrities being exposed and stuff talking about it and
Speaker 5: stuff like that. So I like to believe that Benitudor
Speaker 5: and that interview and stuff kind of led to what's
Speaker 5: happening now.
Speaker 6: It starts.
Speaker 5: I believe that Benitudor is starting to bring brought awareness
Speaker 5: to a lot of things that a lot of things
Speaker 5: that was happening.
Speaker 1: So are you still in touch with the Gregory Brothers? Now?
Speaker 5: See when I did it, just did that INNYW just
Speaker 5: did that video that when viral. People had it in
Speaker 5: their mind that I wasn't getting paid for the song
Speaker 5: and me and the Gregory Brothers we have a good bit.
Speaker 5: See they thought when I did that interview, I was
Speaker 5: not talking about the song because most people use the clip,
Speaker 5: the news clip, which is owned by WAFF, and they
Speaker 5: use my likeness not necessarily the song.
Speaker 6: And that's what.
Speaker 5: I was telling them, Like, look y'all made so much
Speaker 5: money off of that interview.
Speaker 6: You know what I'm saying. The only money that I
Speaker 6: made off of that interview alone.
Speaker 5: I made sixty thousand dollars off of that interview in
Speaker 5: fourteen years because WFF owns it.
Speaker 1: So where did that number come from?
Speaker 5: That's the money that I made overall from the interview alone. Like,
Speaker 5: that's not the better the song because with the interview
Speaker 5: with the people don't understand that interview has been in movies,
Speaker 5: it has been in TV shows, it has been in commercials.
Speaker 5: It has been in people's commercials for their businesses, and
Speaker 5: I never seen a diamond back. And I know that
Speaker 5: it generated a lot of money. Yes, And I don't
Speaker 5: know if WFF is getting paid because somebody brought something
Speaker 5: to my attention. They were saying, like, you know, the
Speaker 5: WFF got paid for your video on YouTube when they
Speaker 5: put it on YouTube and got all the millions of things.
Speaker 6: They got to check for that. Yes, I didn't. I
Speaker 6: didn't go viral on my page. I've never went viral
Speaker 6: on my page. I have.
Speaker 5: What people don't understand is I have been going viral
Speaker 5: every other month for the last fourteen years on other
Speaker 5: people's pages.
Speaker 6: And I have watched people make bread. I have watched people,
Speaker 6: and I know that these apps make money. Yea.
Speaker 5: And when you see Antoine Dotson, if you see a
Speaker 5: video of somebody doing Antoine dots and using my likeness
Speaker 5: in that video and you got ten and fifteen million views,
Speaker 5: I know that you're making money from I'm not dumb,
Speaker 5: of course, I know that.
Speaker 6: You're making money from that.
Speaker 5: And nobody stay well, here asy, he's cut, here's a cut,
Speaker 5: here's five dollars. You know what I'm saying, I appreciate
Speaker 5: you doing benitudo or whatever.
Speaker 1: But the Gregory brothers have been have always been.
Speaker 6: Well, they have always been good to me. I'm still
Speaker 6: living off of.
Speaker 5: Banituda song money, okay, and I have a good relationship
Speaker 5: with them. We travel together when we want to perform.
Speaker 6: I got to tell you this story real quick. It's
Speaker 6: so funny. It's quick. So we was.
Speaker 5: At BT Awards, No, not BT Awards, were at one
Speaker 5: or sixter part and so you know the Gregory brothers,
Speaker 5: all of them are brothers and sisters, and yeah, they
Speaker 5: got a wife that's a part who's sings.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So we were in a dressing room. She walked
Speaker 6: in the dressing rooms.
Speaker 5: She was like, oh my god, this is such a
Speaker 5: dream come true to see Bettu And they climbing in
Speaker 5: your window at BT.
Speaker 6: Every calling because you know they're white.
Speaker 5: So it's so funny, like we all all every time
Speaker 5: we get together.
Speaker 6: Is like a It was so funny. It was so funny.
Speaker 1: And in spite of it all, Kevin is still online today,
Speaker 1: making regular content for TikTok, either commenting on the news
Speaker 1: or reflecting on his career as an influencer. And if
Speaker 1: you happen to be a prospective or recovering character of
Speaker 1: the day. Here's his advice to be.
Speaker 5: Successful in Internet because I noticed with a lot of
Speaker 5: internet stars after me, nobody really They burn out very fast,
Speaker 5: two to three months and they're done. So he's been
Speaker 5: fourteen years for me because I never shot away from.
Speaker 6: Who I truly was. You know who I truly am.
Speaker 5: I always try to stay as close as to who
Speaker 5: I am as possible because when you start doing all
Speaker 5: this crazy shit for clicks, you burn out, and then
Speaker 5: if you don't have to do videos every day all day,
Speaker 5: you burn out like that.
Speaker 6: There's a balance to this Internet stuff.
Speaker 5: Well one, you have to be authentic, and I noticed
Speaker 5: that everybody is biting off to each other.
Speaker 6: Everybody is doing the exact same thing, and they're burning out.
Speaker 6: My advice is be authentic. Be as authentic as.
Speaker 5: You can possibly be, because that is going to take
Speaker 5: you far.
Speaker 1: So talking with Antoine or Kevin as he goes by
Speaker 1: in his personal life was completely surreal. It wasn't expecting
Speaker 1: to be starstruck in the way that I was. But
Speaker 1: he is someone who has lived in my mind for
Speaker 1: a decade and a half and it's a very particular
Speaker 1: kind of celebrity encounter. I want to thank him for
Speaker 1: his willingness to be with me about his childhood as
Speaker 1: well as his experience becoming Internet famous. And you can
Speaker 1: check out what he's up to now at the links
Speaker 1: in the description. Understanding Kevin's life better really helped pull
Speaker 1: this story into focus for me, But there's still that
Speaker 1: element that never quite sat well. That the further this
Speaker 1: story got away from the public, the less we heard
Speaker 1: about Kelly Dodson. What the fuck is that about? We're
Speaker 1: going to talk about that in part two, Next Time
Speaker 1: on sixteenth Minute. Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, posted, and produced
Speaker 1: by me Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman
Speaker 1: and Robert Evans. He Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising
Speaker 1: producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad
Speaker 1: thirteen and Pet. Shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, my
Speaker 1: Kat's Flee and Casper and my pet Rockbird, who will
Speaker 1: outlive us all. Bye.