Chris Brown Can Keep His Hands To Himself

Last week, lots of people asked me who I was most excited to see perform at the Coldplay and American Idol Show Grammy's. I was not shy about sharing that I was psyched to see a preggers and performing-on-her-due-date, M.I.A. (I was half hoping her water would break on stage). But my secret favorite that I was so looking forward to seeing was Rihanna.

I'll confess, I've liked pretty much all of Rihanna's songs and if I was 15 years younger, I'd probably be trying to do my best to jack some of her style. No, she's not the best singer on earth, but when I saw her last year on Kanye West's "Glow In The Dark" tour, she held her own and was pretty entertaining. I also admire that she's done a lot to try to raise awareness of the need for black bone marrow donors because too many black children die from leukemia due to no bone marrow matches.

Well, you and I didn't get to see Rihanna perform at the Grammy's because she canceled, and so did her boyfriend, Chris Brown. Why did they cancel? A "car accident" in Hancock Park was the lie that was floated around by their PR people... except for the fact that car accidents don't cause bite marks on Rihanna. And car accidents don't cause serious bruises on her either. Oh, and Chris got booked on a charge of felony criminal threats last night and was also charged with assault with a deadly weapon this morning. Even though she was not officially named last night, this morning, Rihanna was finally named as the victim.

It's so sad to see that smacking women around is allegedly Chris Brown's M-O, especially since he grew up seeing domestic violence in his home. There is no excuse for a man to ever put his hands on a woman, and if he grew up seeing his stepfather beating down his mom, he really should know better.

As for Rihanna, I don't know whether she will cooperate with the LAPD or not, but regardless, the police have the evidence that she was assaulted and so the District Attorney can pursue the case against him. I hope he doesn't get the usual star treatment that seems to go down in this town. If he does, he'll be doing community service.

What is really extra disturbing though are comments on sites like TMZ, Bossip and Media Take Out saying that she deserved this because she's a bad singer, because she's annoying and clingy, because she was just riding on Chris Brown's fame, because she probably hit him first and so she deserved to get hit back, and because of a rumor started by the site Bossip that Rihanna gave Chris herpes. That right there is just insane.

So the comments are stuff like this:

"Bitch give me herpes i’ma slap fire out her ass too. She got what she deserve. Bitch was trippin all last week about jumpoff central and then she burn him with the herp. I woulda went megatron on that hoe."

"That snitch! She better leave my man alone! I hope you DID beat that bish down! I still love you, Breezy!"

"There is no way Chris Brown did any of this...if anything he was probably fighting her off. I have heard she super jealous and quite a drama queen...we'll see when the truth comes out!"

And then there are the racial ones, insinuating that Barack Obama probably smacks Michelle Obama because, "all those n***** act like that!"

Just wow. And there are hundreds of other comments like those.

Not only am I upset by Chris Brown's alleged behavior, I'm also thinking about the thousands of women who get hit by men around the world every single day, and this is what the average American thinks about it.

How sad that we live in a world where this whole nation got up in arms over NFL player Michael Vick assaulting dogs! Michael Vick is doing time over it! But if a teenage star beats on his girlfriend, what's gonna happen?

I guess the lesson is that in our society, for some, the life of a dog is more valued than the life of a woman. And that is really a shame.