The fallout behind Nicki Minaj’s scandalous tweets about her cousin’s testicles continues almost a week after the #ballgate scandal began.
On September 13, Nicki created a worldwide controversy when she claimed her cousin’s friend in Trinidad received the COVID-19 vaccine and ended up with swollen testicles, which rendered him impotent.
“My cousin in Trinidad won’t get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & became impotent. His testicles became swollen. His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding. So just pray on it & make sure you’re comfortable with ur decision, not bullied,” Nicki Minaj said.
Her comments were immediately cheered by right-wingers like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.
But she was accused of spreading false information by notables like Joy Reid, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Terrence Dyalsingh, the Health Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.
“There’s no evidence that it happens nor is there any mechanistic reason to imagine that it would happen. So the answer to your question is no,” Dr. Fauci said.
Things only grew worse after Nicki said she was invited to the White House, while folks in the Oval Office said the rapper was offered a phone call to educate her on the vaccine.
The Barbs, Nicki’s rabid fanbase, took things to another level after a journalist in Trinidad named Sharlene Rampersad started contacting her family on the island, in an attempt to track down her cousin’s friend with the swollen testicles.
Nicki did not take kindly to her family being harrassed, so she “doxxed” the reporter by leaking her phone number to her millions of Twitter followers while promising that “her days are (expletive deleted) numbered.”
“They’ve told me to kill myself. I’ve gotten WhatsApp messages, text messages, and messages on telegraph. I deactivated all of my social media except my Twitter…the locals who have chimed in to threaten, to call me, to harass me, I don’t appreciate that. It makes me fear for my safety here, which I should not have to do,” Rampersad said,
Twitter reportedly disciplined the rapper because “doxxing” is against Twitter’s terms of service.
The Media Association of T&T (MATT) has blasted the rapper for leaking Rampersad’s information, which has caused the reporter to fear for her life after she started receiving death threats from Nicki’s supporters.
“Nicki Minaj’s celebrity gangsterism towards Guardian Media Ltd’s (GML) reporter, Sharlene Rampersad, is textbook cyberbullying and intimidation of a free press in a young democracy,” the organization said in a statement.
“While Ms. Minaj may be justified in calling for scrutiny of the journalist’s methods—that is, stoking the fears of an ordinary citizen caught, through no action of his own, in the maelstrom of an international story—the rapper’s doxxing and cussing are extreme reactions that should concern those closest to her. Sensational as this story may be, it is but a global amplification of the relentless intimidation of T&T journalists that has become routine,” MATT said in a statement.
Over the past several years, a variety of journalists in the country have been attacked and assaulted for reporting, so Rampersad’s concerns are legitimate.
In 2017, a photographer named Kristian De Silva who works for Trinidad’s Guardian newspaper was assaulted while reporting on an oil company. That same year another reporter for the Trinidad-Express was assaulted and robbed.
In 2020, several members of the local media were beat up by security guards at the San Fernando General Hospital as they attempted to report about the soaring cases of COVID-19 in the country.