‘The Breakfast Club’ Disrespected Black Women. Again.
Survivor Sil Lai Abrams speaks out on Russell Simmons’ presence on the show
When The Breakfast Club announced that Russell Simmons would be appearing on the show, one of his most vocal accusers of sexual assault, Sil Lai Abrams, swiftly took to the internet to address the bias since neither she nor Drew Dixon nor Sherri Hines had been invited to tell their sides of the story. Just a few weeks since the release of On the Record, a documentary about Russell Simmons’ alleged attacks on the aforementioned women and their decades-long fear of coming out with their stories, there has not been ample engagement in Black media about these women’s tremendous courage.
Sil Lai Abrams spoke with ZORA this afternoon on the immediate aftermath of The Breakfast Club’s neglect, what this means for survivors, and how she intends to fight back.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
ZORA: How are you feeling after finding out that Russell Simmons was going to appear on The Breakfast Club?
Sil Abrams: So, last night, April Reign and Fred T. Joseph held a tweet chat about On the Record. It was a watch party. I was in the process of reading the comments and the feedback from people who were tweeting about one of the most painful experiences of my life. And while even though people were very supportive, it’s still painful, right? And so that’s when I got wind that Russell was going on The Breakfast Club. It was a gut punch. It just knocked the wind out of me. At the same time, I already knew that there has been a fortress put around Russell by certain actors of Black media, where they are not reporting anything on the film. It’s been crickets.
Within the hip-hop community and Black pop culture community, we’re all one degree away from Russell Simmons. There are too many people who have made money off their relationship to Russell or someone who’s connected to Russell. It is reflective of the issue that we talked about in the film, which is the erasing and silencing of Black victims of sexual violence, and how we, the community, perpetrate this against Black women in particular, but all survivors. Black women’s issues have always been considered a subset of Black…
