On Friday, in a blog post titled “Ian Connor Is a Rapist, and I Know Firsthand,” Malika Anderson, a senior at Emory University, accused Connor of rape.
“I pursued charges against Ian Connor for raping me,” she wrote. “Yes, that’s right folks, Ian Connor–the fashion nigga people love to stan for–is a rapist. My detective never said I couldn’t talk about my case, but I decided not to because I wanted to get everything taken care of before I spoke about it publicly.”“I am speaking now because my case is basically closed. And I am finally ready to share my entire story. I want the world to know who they are praising… I know the truth. And I know that I did not want to have sex with Ian Connor. He raped me.”For those unfamiliar, Connor is a popular stylist to the hip-hop stars, first working closely with Wiz Khalifa before transitioning over to Wiz’s sometime rival Kanye West to help work on his Yeezy Season 2 fashion line. He’s also an affiliate of A$AP Mob, a rap collective led by Bronx emcee A$AP Rocky, and signed to A$AP’s art direction team AWGE. A$AP once referred to Connor as “king of the youth” for his Tumblr influence and streetwear stylings.
According to the post, Anderson claims that Connor raped her on October 5, 2014. She alleges they’d hung out twice casually in Atlanta but “never did anything sexual.” That, says Anderson, changed on their third rendezvous.“The 3rd and last time we hung out I hit him up. He came to my crib in the morning and I figured we would just talk and chill per usual… But that isn’t what happened,” she wrote. “We were sitting on my bed, just talking, and he asked if he could eat me out. I declined. And I told him I wasn’t trying to have sex. So he’s like okay. Then he asked again if he could eat me out. I said no again and he just kept asking. He was literally begging to eat me out and he said ‘we don’t gotta fuck, I just wanna eat it. I wanna eat your soul out girl’ blah blah. And I was just like ‘nah I’m good’ but he kept begging. Eventually, I gave in. I said ‘fine you can give me head’. Then he said ‘lemme eat it from the back’. So I layed on my stomach and pulled my pants down about halfway, the rest of my clothes were still on. He was fully clothed. He started to give me head.”“About 2 minutes later I felt his bare penis thrust inside of me. I was shocked and didn’t know what to do and then I pushed him off of me and I was like wtf. And he says ‘your pussy is wavy. We should’ve did this a long time ago. We could’ve been dating’ and I saod [sic] ‘wtf I told you I didn’t want to have sex and you just did it…’ And he says ‘so you tryna say I raped you’ and at the time I hadn’t even processed what had just happened and I was like ‘I dont know’. After that he left and said he was gonna text me. I was confused. I didn’t want to call it rape but I also couldn’t call it consensual sex because I had already told him I didn’t want to have sex with him and he took advantage of me being in a position in which he could penetrate me anyway when I wasn’t looking. It was diabolical. But at the time, I didn’t know how to think of it.”Anderson claims in the post that she got tested for STDs the next day and would later learn she’d contracted gonorrhea. She also alleged that Connor had created a dummy account on Twitter to harass and intimidate her via DM.“His harassing messages prompted me to file a police report,” she wrote, claiming to have filed one in December 2015. And Anderson further alleges that several other women who’d been “assaulted” by Connor gave statements to detectives involved in her case.
“Since then I’ve given statements, sent in evidence, and gotten other women that he assaulted to speak to my detective,” wrote Anderson. “The detectives at the Special Victims Unit at my country police station have been working to gather as much evidence as possible and build a case. The problem is, when it comes to bringing everything to the judge, there isn’t a lot of concrete evidence that actually proves the rape happened. Essentially, the only thing they can really go on is my word. Moreover, the other women who spoke to the detective are not comfortable filing their own reports. They gave statements and I am thankful for that as it did contribute to the building of my case, but the statements can not be taken as concrete evidence unless they were to file their own reports in the cities in which their assaults occurred.”
“Unfortunately, my statement, a few screenshots, and some information from my doctor and from my school, won’t be regarded as substantial evidence in a court of law,” she continued. “Because of this, my detective told me yesterday that the case is likely to be closed for the time being. It can be reopened if more evidence is found or if any other women decide to come forward, but for right now, there isn’t much else that can be done. So basically these past few months have somewhat been a waste of my time bc even though I was raped, nothing will likely happen to the person who raped me aka Ian Connor. #America”
After Anderson’s post went up today, R&B singer Justine Skye tweeted (and then deleted) a defense of Connor, writing, “trying to tarnish someone’s name and lying for a quick come up is never cool or funny… do better,” while rapper OG Maco defended Connor, claiming that the Twitterati was “tryna Bill Cosby” him, before sharing a problematic tweet by the alleged victim:
Others on Twitter have dug up this old—and disturbing—2013 tweet that Connor posted (and then deleted) that seems eerily similar to Anderson’s story:
Connor, for his part, addressed the accusation in a series of misogynistic and racist tweets: