The life of XXXTentacion was violent, chaotic and complicated – if we pretend otherwise, we do all women a disservice

This article contains graphic descriptions of domestic violence

The suddenness and violence with which XXXTentacion’s life ended was as shocking as the controversies that defined it.

Born Janseh Dwayne Onfroy, the rapper was fatally shot on Monday in Deerfield Beach, Florida.

There have been calls to avoid speaking about his violent past and to focus instead on the music, to celebrate his talents and not to talk about the chaos that he created. But to do so would be yet another example of society’s willingness to overlook patterns of male violence and abuse in favour of their so-called “genius”, in the way that we have done so in the past with others like Chris Brown, Bill Cosby and R Kelly.

The music industry, and hip hop in particular, has a nasty habit of rewarding male rappers who abuse women while simultaneously asking women to look past said abuse and see those male rappers’ “potential” or “capacity for change”. Yet unlike Brown, Cosby and Kelly, XXXTentacion’s criminal charges were known from the start; as his friend and fellow rapper Denzel Curry noted to HotNewHipHop: “The thing with X is, when he got into trouble, that’s what blew him up.”

Fans found the dangerous aspect of his persona alluring; the image of the misunderstood bad boy rejected by the mainstream had a darkly romantic aspect to it. Put simply, that persona helped sell music. But as recently as a month ago in a rare interview, Onfroy had spoken – boasted, even – of stomping on the head of his gay cellmate in jail for “staring” at him. In the interview, Onfroy repeatedly called the boy a “faggot” and claimed he told a guard: “If he does anything I disapprove of, I’m gonna kill him.”

He nearly did. Two weeks later, when the cellmate “started staring”, Onfroy said he responded by placing the boy’s head on a concrete slab and stamping down.

“The guard hears him [screaming] and I’ve got his blood all over my hands, all of my chest, literally… I was going crazy. I smear his blood on my face, on my hands. I got it, like, in my nails. I got it all over me. I was going f**king crazy.”

Onfroy claimed the guards pulled him off but did not charge him, instead telling him to clean up. His mother visited him that day, and when she asked him about the blood under his fingernails, he responded: “This n***a did some gay s**t, so I had to crack his head open.”

This wasn’t the first time Onfroy had bragged about the incident; in 2016 he used the story to promote new music, telling the podcast No Jumper the story in similarly graphic detail, and with apparently zero remorse – going so far as to laugh as he recalled the “craziness”. There’s a video of the interview on YouTube.

In the aforementioned profile piece, the journalist for the Miami New Times observed how – after reviewing hundreds of pages of court documents and speaking with Onfroy for two hours, along with his alleged victim, old friends, fans and enemies – he was not so much “profoundly addled… as much as pathetically insecure, obsessed with power, and incapable of following one essential directive of human conduct”.

“It’s so simple,” Geneva Ayala, the woman who accused him of violently assaulting her, said: “Just don’t hit anybody.”

Onfroy’s treatment of Ayala was said to have ranged from psychological and emotional abuse to the shockingly physical. In one incident recounted to a prosecutor, she said Onfroy asked her which object she wanted him to force into her vagina: a long-handled barbecue fork, or a wire barbecue brush.

His favourite thing, though, asides from backhanding her mouth, was to guilt her with threatened attempts at suicide. Ayala said he used to fill a bathtub with water then fetch the microwave and dangle it over, threatening to let go. Another time he reportedly dangled himself from a 12th-storey balcony by his legs and threatened suicide again.

This reported pattern of abuse suggests a person who delighted in the torture of another human being; a woman who he knew had no real money of her own, nor a secure home to run back to. Maybe Onfroy would have changed his ways, maybe not, but it is precisely that way of thinking that keeps domestic violence victims captive in the cycle of abuse, convinced that someday their loved one will wake up and realise their mistakes. And we know, all too often, how those cases end.

Responding to the charges in a September 2017 Instagram video, Onfroy said: “Everybody that called me a domestic abuser, I’m going to domestically abuse y’all little sister’s p***y from the back.” Which doesn’t really sound like someone filled with remorse for their very recent past.

He and his representatives appeared to try and repair the damage caused by the ongoing case against him and other incidents. In October last year he announced plans to donate more than $100,000 to a domestic abuse charity; two months later he said he wanted to organise an “anti-rape” event. But neither effort appeared to make any headway.

Fans are praised the fact that Onfroy helped them with issues with depression, something he himself reportedly suffered from. Yet the way he dealt with and portrayed mental health issues could be seen as dangerous.

“Jocelyn Flores”, one of his most popular songs, is a moving ode to a friend who took her own life.

On another of his most-streamed tracks, “SAD!”, he threatens to take his own life if his lover leaves him.

Who am I? Someone that's afraid to let go, uh

You decide, if you're ever gonna, let me know (yeah)

Suicide, if you ever try to let go, uh

I'm sad and low, yeah

I'm sad and low, yeah

In 2017, Onfroy posted an Instagram video with no caption which appeared to show him hanging himself from a tree, sparking an online panic. It later emerged that this was for a music video.

Given how he presented himself as a voice for suicidal youth, it was sickening to see the way in which he taunted them with a mock video of his own death. Responding to the uproar, the man now known internationally as XXXTentacion then seemed to blame others for the reaction, asking: “Do you all really think I could kill myself and show that to the kids? You don’t think I have more dignity than that?”

His death provides nothing in the way of closure, either for fans of his music or those who hoped he would finally face justice for the horrific allegations against him. Fans will make him immortal, a genius dead too soon, while some of his more outspoken critics have been ghoulishly claiming that his death is some kind of karma from his previous behaviour. Neither one feels right, because, as others have pointed out, Onfroy’s identity as an artist and a person was far more nuanced than that.

He was neither hero nor villain, angel or devil. We cannot view someone in such simplified extremes, but unfortunately that appears to be a frequent occurrence in the social media age, where platforms such as Twitter are where rational, sensible debate goes to die.

What we must remember is how society has a debt to pay to the women who come forward with allegations of abuse, and why we need to learn from the mistakes the media and the music industry made with Onfroy. As Craig Jenkins of Vulture pointed out: “The current climate of simply shovelling more money and clout at rappers with dangerous tendencies and hoping they’ll straighten themselves out is untenable.”

Perhaps the hardest and most important lesson that those in the music industry need to learn from the life and death of XXXTentacion is that they need to start prioritising women’s lives over men’s careers.