Last week, it came to light that singer Otep Shamaya took matters into her own hands dealing with an audience member at a show in Belvedere, IL. According to what she said in a statement, the supposedly large and drunk man threw a woman into the sound board, then called the singer a “cunt” and rushed the stage. She retaliated by hitting him with her microphone, he asked her to hit him again, and she did before he was removed by security. However, video footage has surfaced of the event that might call some of that into question.
It’s hard to see exactly what happens, but you do see Otep hit the guy with a microphone after asking if he’d called her that. The thing is that she hits him again very quickly. While it’s not out of the realm of impossibility that he did ask her to hit him again, she does it in such rapid succession that it would be hard to tell if he really did ask her to hit him again. Also, she doesn’t really look like anyone’s coming at her. Either she doesn’t lose her cool in situations when she’s being charged, or she wasn’t really in that much danger in the first place. If she just reacted to being called a pejorative slur by some drunk douchebag, she might have crossed a line. That being said, in the wake of Dimebag, if there was any possibility that she might have been charged at by the guy, we can’t blame her. When you have a split second to make a decision, you have to act quick, and she certainly did.
There’s some expletives here so my apologies, but this is what happened with OTEP at the show last Sunday.
Posted by Monica De Leon on Tuesday, June 9, 2015
[via theprp]
