Rihanna posted a takedown of Snapchat on her Instagram story, responding to an advertisement of a mobile game that made light of domestic violence. The controversial and since-removed ad referenced Rihanna’s 2009 assault by Chris Brown.
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As a promotion for the mobile game Would Your Rather?, the advertisement asked if the user would rather “slap Rihanna” or “punch Chris Brown.” Snapchat had already released a public apology and removed the ad before Rihanna’s comments.
“I’d love to call it ignorance, but I know you ain’t that dumb! You spent money to animate something that would intentionally bring shame to DV victims and made a joke of it!!!” she wrote. “This isn’t about my personal feelings, cause I don’t have much of them … but all the women, children and men that have been victims of DV in the past and especially the ones who haven’t made it out yet … you let us down! Shame on you. Throw the whole app-oligy away.”
Rihanna responding to Snapchat’s ad. I can’t believe they did this. pic.twitter.com/TpHQIXTm4j
— Gennette Cordova (@GNCordova) March 15, 2018
Earlier this week, Snapchat called the advertisement an “error.” A spokesperson for the app released a follow-up apology after Rihanna’s post, condemning the advertisement as “disgusting” and a “terrible mistake.”
“We are investigating how that happened so that we an make sure it never happens again,” the spokesperson said. The game’s company has been blocked from Snapchat.
Chris Brown was arrested in 2009 after attacking Rihanna, his girlfriend at the time. In the years following, Rihanna has been vocal about the ways pop culture continues “punishing” victims of domestic violence, including when the NFL pulled her collaboration with Jay-Z and Kanye West, “Run This Town,” in 2014 after the Ray Rice domestic-abuse scandal.
“I just never understood that,” she told Vanity Fair in 2015. “How the victim gets punished over and over. […] For me, and anyone who’s been a victim of domestic abuse, nobody wants to even remember it. Nobody event wants to admit it. So to talk about it and say it once, much less 200 times, is like … I have to be punished for it? It didn’t sit well with me.”
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