The rapper responded to the accusations in a statement to Pitchfork

Note: This article contains descriptions of alleged sexual assault that some readers may find disturbing.

Four women have accused Victor Vazquez, the rapper known as Kool A.D., formerly of Das Racist, of sexual assault. In interviews with Pitchfork, Vazquez’s estranged wife Saba Moeel, former friend Marta Martinez, former collaborator Andie Flores, and an acquaintance who asked to be referred to as Senn for this article, described claims of non-consensual sexual activity that allegedly took place between 2006 and 2015. In an emailed statement to Pitchfork, Vazquez confirmed the sexual encounters but maintained that he believed them to have been consensual. “It was never my intention to hurt anybody, but through ignorance, entitlement and ego, I now see that I have,” he wrote.

Moeel, a visual artist who also makes music under the name Cult Days, first made her allegations in December 2017, when she posted a series of vitriolic tweets calling out many men she felt had wronged her throughout her life. The main target of her anger was Vazquez, whom she married in April 2014; their daughter was born in September of that year.

“If anyone treated my daughter the way I have been treated I would snap their necks in an alley and feel good about it,” she tweeted. Moeel also called out Vazquez for what she saw as a disconnect between his public persona as a champion of social justice causes and his private actions: “These same men will loud talk about how they are being oppressed, say fuck [the] police, and turn around act like the worst kind of crooked cop toward women,” she wrote. (In February 2018, Moeel elaborated on those tweets in an interview with Consequence of Sound.)

Moeel told Pitchfork that while going through the process of ending her marriage last year, she realized that her initial sexual encounter with Vazquez, which took place in 2010 or 2011, was non-consensual. “Our first time was at his parents’ house, and I told him straight up, ‘We can hook up, but I don’t want to have sex tonight,’ and he said, ‘OK,’” she said. “He did it anyway, and I just froze, and he was like, ‘Oh it’s OK, just for a little bit.’”

She also said that he forced her to perform oral sex on him without her consent during a New Year’s party at a friend’s house in 2011 or 2012. “He basically made me give him head while I was super drunk and wanting to throw up and go to the bathroom, and then spent the whole night with me by the toilet as I threw up,” she said.

In his email to Pitchfork, Vazquez said, “I remember that first sexual encounter to be consensual and she never mentioned the event to be otherwise to me until the end of our four-year marriage. Regarding the New Year’s Party, we were both intoxicated, but I was under the assumption at the time, and for several years after the fact, that the oral sex was consensual.”

He added, “Despite everything, Saba is still the mother of my child so I am bound by my daughter’s blood to love her and care for her mental and physical health and safety. I have been working to better myself and will continue to do so, and similarly, I hope Saba finds the help she needs.”

Marta Martinez and Vazquez were close friends who attended Wesleyan University together in the early-to-mid-2000s. They had been physically intimate on and off during that time. By the summer of 2006, when Martinez and Vazquez’s alleged incident took place, their relationship was strictly platonic, she said. Martinez had graduated and was living in San Francisco at the time; Vazquez would often crash at her apartment when he was in town. When he asked to stay over that night in June 2006, she didn’t think anything of it, she said.

“He woke me up multiple times throughout the night trying to make advances, and I kept telling him no,” she said. “Finally he woke me up at like 6 or 6:30 in the morning. And I was feeling super pressured. I think my exact words were, ‘OK, fine.’ But then I immediately fell asleep. I was sleeping and I felt him inside of me. And I said, ‘What the fuck?’ I will never forget my first response.”

A few weeks later, Martinez said, she learned that she was pregnant. Vazquez paid for her to have an abortion and accompanied her home after the procedure, both parties confirmed to Pitchfork.

“The night in question, I remember her to be awake but I admit I was intoxicated so my ability to discern that may have been impaired,” Vazquez told Pitchfork. “I was surprised to hear her memory of those events weeks later which I heard through a mutual friend, but I don’t wish to deny her truth, after all we were both drinking and my memory of events is hazy.” (Martinez told Pitchfork that she and Vazquez may have drank alcohol earlier in the night, but she was sober by the time of the alleged assault.)

It wasn’t until after the abortion that “the flood of negative feelings started to hit me,” Martinez said. “Having to go through the trauma of going through an abortion. Having been pregnant in the first place. Feeling extremely violated by this person who at certain points in our friendship was my best friend.”

“I was embarrassed that that had happened to me,” Martinez said. “It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I was actually a victim of his actions.”

Three mutual college friends of Martinez’s and Vazquez’s told Pitchfork that they had spoken with both Martinez and Vazquez about the alleged sexual assault and abortion in the months following those events.

Martinez said that she did not consider going to the police. “I was in complete denial,” she recalled. “Like, this is my friend. I must have misunderstood what happened. I must be remembering this incorrectly. I must have done something or said something wrong. It took me a while to even use the word ‘rape’ about what happened.”

Martinez said she is coming forward now because “it pained me to learn he continued to hurt others.” She added, “I’m tired of protecting him with my anonymity. I’m calling on his community to hold him accountable, to take the onus off of his victims so that we can focus on healing.”

“I would like to apologize again to Marta,” Vazquez wrote in his email to Pitchfork. “It was never my intention to hurt her and I wish her peace and send her love.”

On December 4, 2013, Senn (a pseudonym requested for this article) went to a Kool A.D. show at the Middle East in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 20 at the time; Vazquez was 29. The two had met briefly twice before. Senn went to the show with a friend, and afterwards, she and the friend ended up at a gathering with Vazquez and several others.

Both Senn and Vazquez took hallucinogenic mushrooms at the party, they independently confirmed to Pitchfork, and on the way home, Senn said that she started hallucinating. She said that she invited Vazquez over to her apartment, thinking, “We’re gonna just chill. Maybe we can make art together.”

When he arrived at the apartment, Senn said Vazquez began “aggressively kissing” her. “It kind of put me into shock,” she said. “In my head, the option of being like, ‘No no no no no’ was not there, because I was too intoxicated.” (Vazquez told Pitchfork that he was also intoxicated that night.)

Senn said that at some point after she and Vazquez had moved to her bed, and he had put his hands in her shorts, he said, “I need to know this is OK with you.” She said, “I rationalized, like, ‘This is OK, but nothing past this. I don’t want anything past this.’”

Senn said that Vazquez started to perform oral sex on her, despite her telling him not to. She added, “Then he kept trying to pull my legs apart to have sex with me, and I kept closing my legs and crossing my legs in as many ways as I could.”

Senn said that Vazquez then put his penis in her mouth. “I couldn’t stop shaking my head, like, ‘No.’ All I could think is, ‘My roommates are asleep. I don’t want to disturb their sleep. Why is this happening?’ I couldn’t process any of it.”

She continued, “After that, he masturbated and he finished—twice. I’m just in shock lying there in my own bed.”

The next morning, Senn said, she was still trying to process what had happened. She and Vazquez went to brunch together and then went their separate ways. Senn said that she did not go to the police, but she did go to a crisis center.

Both of Senn’s roommates at the time told Pitchfork that they saw Vazquez at their apartment that night, and both said that Senn seemed deeply shaken by the incident. Both roommates, Senn’s boss at the time, and the friend who attended the Kool A.D. show with her all also confirmed to Pitchfork that Senn had told them that she had been sexually assaulted very soon after the alleged incident.

Vazquez wrote in his email to Pitchfork, “My memory of events differs from hers on a number of points, but I do not wish to deny her truth. I believe her pain to be real and I am sorry to have caused it. In retrospect I can see that I came over to her place making the wrong assumptions, I did not make a sufficient effort to understand her wants and needs, I let drugs, alcohol, ego, and lust cloud my empathy and awareness.”

“It really changed my life,” Senn said of the alleged assault. “I couldn’t keep in touch with my own mother for a year and a half after it happened, because there was so much shame, and she didn’t understand. It was so awful. He has no idea what he took away from me.”

Saba Moeel, Vazquez’s estranged wife, found out about Senn’s allegations two years later, in the summer of 2015, via a social media post. She then called Senn to hear her side of the story. “I was just trying to understand what kind of person I married,” Moeel said.

Mooel said that her conversation with Senn was a turning point for her. “From that moment, I’ve been trying to arrange myself and my life in a way that would save me and save my daughter.”

Andie Flores, an Austin, Texas-based visual and performance artist, met Vazquez at the South by Southwest music festival in the spring of 2012 through a mutual friend. She was 22 years old; Vazquez was 28. That summer, when Flores moved to New York, she started hanging out with Das Racist and their friends and assisting with show booking, merch sales, and more.

At Bonnaroo in June 2012, Flores told Pitchfork that Vazquez “tried to finger me” while they were both riding in a van. Later that summer, when they were both back in New York, he had sex with her without her consent and without protection, she said. “He put it in, did whatever he wanted to do. Took it out, and fell asleep right away. Like a dumping, was what it felt like,” she told Pitchfork.

Three years later, in 2015, Flores was living in Austin, and she let Vazquez stay at her place during SXSW, knowing that she wouldn’t be alone with him due to the fact that her sister and her friends were staying with her that weekend. On Vazquez’s last night in town, Flores told Pitchfork that she gave in to him pressuring her and let him stay in her bed. She said that he again had sex with her without her consent and without protection.

Flores said that she was not more forceful with Vazquez because “I just didn’t feel totally safe. And I didn’t want him to be mad at me. Which is crazy.”

“I was embarrassed, I felt used, I was super confused,” she said. “It’s weird because I feel like no one I’ve ever been friends with has ever made me laugh as much as Victor. I really enjoyed hanging out with him, and I didn’t quite understand the nature of things that happened. Or I just didn’t want it to be true that I was being used for things. I wanted to feel important in some way, or that we were friends.”

“I couldn’t quite process at the time how to feel better,” Flores said. “It wasn’t like he straight up raped me, right? I mean, I could have hit him or yelled or freaked him out to leave me alone, but we were friends! That’s just how he was, and it sucked, but the other parts of the friendship were good and cool, right? There was a very clear power dynamic and for some reason, I wanted to be blind to it. You don’t treat a friend like that. You don’t.”

In his email to Pitchfork, Vazquez said, “Regarding Andie, my memory of our relationship differs from hers in a number of ways but again, I do not wish to deny her truth and instead have been reflecting critically on my own behavior.”

In early 2017, Flores experienced a breakthrough after watching an episode of the TV show “Girls.” In the episode, Lena Dunham’s character, Hannah, confronts a famous, well-respected older male writer about sexual misconduct allegations made against him by college girls. The story is all about the murky power dynamics underlying sexual encounters between artists and fans.

“I just sobbed through the credits,” Flores said. “Watching that validated my shitty experiences. Of course I had a right to be upset. What he did to me wasn’t OK.”

When asked why she decided to go public with her story, Flores said, “Ultimately, I decided I just wanted other women—all women—to be protected from his behavior and for everyone to recognize that it wasn’t OK. I was tired of seeing Victor lauded as this super ‘woke,’ always-100-percent-right, anti-government feminist—when he’s not.”

Writing to Pitchfork, Vazquez said:

“I know I still have a lot of unlearning to do regarding sex, ego, pride, and masculinity. I’m learning to recognize the toxic ideals of masculinity that I unthinkingly bought into. I compulsively sought validation through sex, selfishly unaware of the harm I was causing. I’m trying to be vigilant about consent, have more direct conversations, check myself and really be present and attentive to the wants and needs of the women in my life and not just in sexual relationships but in my relationships with all women. I’m trying to not prioritize my wants and needs over the wants and needs of others. I’m trying to be as open as possible and listen as much as possible and not try to inject my ego into every situation I find myself in. I am learning to confront myself now so that I may transform my toxic patterns for the sake of my daughter, my family and friends, my girlfriend, my community and myself. I want to utilize whatever is left of my marginal celebrity to help foster more healthy ideas of masculinity and challenge the expectations that arise from gender binaries. I don’t want to cause anyone any more pain. I don’t want to be a source of trauma. I want a clear mind and an open heart.”

If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual violence and need to talk, we recommend these resources:

RAINN

https://rainn.org

1-800-656-HOPE (4673)

Crisis Text Line

https://www.facebook.com/crisistextline (chat support)

SMS: Text “HERE” to 741-741