They share their stories of alleged sexual misconduct and online humiliation by the influential hip-hop tastemaker Adam Grandmaison

Last week, Adam Grandmaison—aka Adam22, the founder of the influential hip-hop podcast and video series No Jumper—took to Twitter to issue a blanket denial that he had ever sexually or physically assaulted any women. His statement came after anonymous allegations of sexual misconduct and physical abuse had been circulating on the social-media platform. “I’ve done plenty of stupid shit in my life. But I’ve never raped or hit a woman,” Grandmaison tweeted.

The accusations drew more scrutiny after Grandmaison announced he was partnering with Atlantic Records to form No Jumper Records, solidifying his status as what Rolling Stone called “underground hip-hop’s major tastemaker.” No Jumper, which has more than 1 million YouTube subscribers, helped launch XXXTentacion, Tekashi69, and Lil Yachty. The New York Times called it “The Paris Review of the face-tattoo set.”

Pitchfork has now spoken to two women who gave their accounts of alleged sexual assault and other misconduct by Grandmaison. He declined to comment for this story at the request of his lawyer. An Atlantic Records spokesperson told Pitchfork, “We take any allegations of this nature very seriously and we are looking into them.”

The first of the two women commented to Pitchfork under the pseudonym “Jane” due to fear of retaliation. In a series of emails and over the phone, she detailed her story, which began when she first met Grandmaison in 2005. They both posted on the same message board. One day they made plans to get together in Manhattan, and Jane ended up taking the subway with him back to his apartment in Queens, where he made advances.

“At first I was OK with it, but quickly became uncomfortable as it went further than I wanted to go,” Jane said. “I told him I wasn’t into it, but he didn’t stop and became pretty angry. Meanwhile, I’m not a big girl, I’m 5'4" and Adam is well over 6'0" and a pretty big guy. I was terrified and froze while he had sex with my basically lifeless body. I was too afraid to fight back in fear that he would hurt me, so I just laid there in terror. I just remember staring out the window and praying it would be over soon.”

She went on: “Eventually, he stopped. I changed and immediately left. I remember waiting in the subway, sobbing. Thinking I should have fought back, I should’ve gotten out of there. I felt guilty, violated, and scared.”

She said she confided in one person “who I thought I trusted” about the alleged assault, but did not go to the police or other authorities. “For reasons I still do not understand, he told Adam,” Jane said. “Adam immediately took to the public forum we were both members of and plastered my supposed ‘lie’ all over it.”

She was “mortified and humiliated,” she said. “I never mentioned the event to anyone again after that in fear of being called a liar or, worse, blamed for what happened. I didn’t feel safe telling anyone my story and just wanted to erase it.”

Several years later, in December 2009, Grandmaison wrote a blog post titled “The Time a Girl Accused Me of Rape,” which Pitchfork has viewed through Archive.org. He included photos of Jane as well as her first name. He also discussed confronting her on the message board about her account of the situation and described, in graphic terms, having sexual intercourse with her, which he maintained was consensual.

“She was letting me touch her all over and was making out with me the whole time, but she didn’t seem like she was really enjoying it all that much,” Grandmaison wrote about Jane in the 1,800-word post. “How much a woman enjoys sexual activity is usually not highly correlated to how much fun I’m having though, so I didn’t give it much thought.”

He concluded: “For most men, being falsely accused of rape is a horrible experience that can ruin their reputation, cost them thousands in legal fees and may land them in jail, but for me I would have to say that it was overall a very positive experience. Viva la fake rape.”

The second woman to come forward asked to be identified only as “D.” Over multiple phone conversations, D told Pitchfork the story of her relationship with Grandmaison. She said that they met through the same message board in 2006. D was 16. Both D and Grandmaison maintain that nothing physical happened at that time, nor did they meet in person, and they stopped talking when he began seeing someone else. Three years later, D had just gotten out of a relationship when she heard from Grandmaison again, she said. He booked her a flight to see him in New York. But first, around June 2009, he flew to her hometown of Vancouver.

D met Grandmaison at the airport and they had dinner. Then they went back to her mother’s house, where she lived, and watched “The Office.” D told Pitchfork that although she had wanted to kiss him, she hadn’t wanted to have sex with him that night.

“I was like, ‘No, just stop,’” she said. “I was pushing him off me and my hands were pushing him, really just, barricading my vagina with my hands. Like, ‘No, don’t go there, don’t put your fingers in there, don’t go anywhere there, I don’t want that.’ And then he’s 6'4" and I’m like 5'3". I was like 120 pounds if that. He easily had 100 pounds on me. When someone is that big and they have the ability to grab both your wrists with their one hand and pull your arms over your head, you can’t do anything,” D said. “And if you try, it’ll just get worse and more painful. What are you supposed to do?”

She told Pitchfork that Grandmaison asked her afterward why she was upset. “I was like, ‘Dude, I told you I wanted to wait,’” she recalled. “‘You knew that this was special to me and I wanted to wait. Why did you do that?’” She said that he told her to keep what had happened a secret between the two of them—and that he mentioned he was still “getting lots of heat” over Jane. “I was terrified.”

D didn’t go to the police. “No one understands why people never went to the cops,” she said. “But when you’re in that moment, your first reaction is not, ‘Oh fuck, let me go to the cops!’ My first reaction was like, ‘My mom is never going to trust me again.’” She said she remembered being frightened that her mother would find blood on the sheets.

D said she put on a “Stepford Wives kind of act” the rest of Grandmaison’s trip. In August 2009, she flew to visit him in New York. “You have to understand that every single one of these decisions was made based off of fear,” she told Pitchfork. By the fall, the relationship had ended.

In January 2010, Grandmaison wrote the first of several blog posts about D, totaling almost 9,000 words. The posts described many of the same events as in D’s account. On the night Grandmaison arrived to visit her in Vancouver, he wrote, they only “cuddled,” because “she was still pretending to not want to bang me.” (In D’s description, this is the same night that the assault allegedly took place.)

In the blog posts, Grandmaison also acknowledged publishing D’s full name. He wrote: “She’s been harassing me asking me to remove the original entry. Sorry, no dice. But, I removed her last name from the initial entry and didn’t include it in this one.”

The posts contained more than a dozen photographs of D, many semi-nude. One of the photos was taken when she was 14 and two others when she was 17, D told Pitchfork. A longtime friend of D’s, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, told Pitchfork via email that she remembered seeing one of the photos at her own 17th birthday party, when D was still 14. The posts also contained extremely graphic descriptions of sex acts involving D and Grandmaison after she was of age.

Earlier this week, in an interview with DJ Akademiks, Grandmaison discussed D’s accusation. When Akademiks asked if there are “other people who claim you raped them,” Grandmaison replied, “Not that I know of.” He didn’t mention Jane or his blog post about her.

A woman who used to date Grandmaison, who asked to be identified only as “O,” said she remembered that Grandmaison “bullied” Jane on the message board. “He made a thread about the whole situation,” she told Pitchfork over the phone.

Four other people confirmed to Pitchfork that D spoke to them about the alleged sexual assault several years ago or more.

Jane told Pitchfork she is speaking out now because D “reached out to me telling me that something similar had happened to her and she never stopped thinking of me and what I went through.”

D said she decided to come forward after a friend showed her the tweets that had been circulating for months about her relationship with Grandmaison. “I have nothing to gain from this,” she told Pitchfork. “I just want justice.”