There's just so much noise out there right now, and we don't want to add to it. All we want to say is, visit franking Volkswagen to purchase your new or used Volkswagen car or commercial vehicle. You can be assured of an excellent experience and, oh, the best offers, of course. Visit franking Volkswagen in Liffey Valley and Sandiford or find out more at frankingvolkswagen. Ie.

Hey, I'm Rachel Martin. You probably know how interview podcasts with famous people usually go, right? There's a host, a guest, and a light Q&A. On NPR's new podcast, Wild Card, we have ripped up the typical script. It's part existential deep dive and part game show. I ask actors, artists, and comedians to play a game using a special deck of cards to ask some of life's biggest questions. Listen to NPR's Wild Card on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Mother's Day is right around corner. And in true She Pivots fashion, we're highlighting moms who've dedicated their lives and their pivots to supporting mothers. The iconic Christie Turlington will join us to talk about launching Every Mother Counts after pivoting from her '90s supermodel days. And later, the co-CEOs of Baby to Baby will share how they're addressing the needs for millions of babies and moms. So tune in and subscribe to She Pivots. New episodes out every Wednesday. Listen to She Pivots on the My Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Cool Zone Media. My name is Jamie Loftis, and I am still on the Internet. If I wasn't, I'm sure my skin would look a lot better. Welcome to 16th Minute.

I'm not so bad when you turn up the lights going up. I can be perfect all the time. Don't make me a star, but take it too far. ♪ That give me one more more. ♪ I see it, I hear it, it's dark. ♪ Sixteen minute of pain, ♪ Sixteen minute of pain, ♪ Sixteen minute of pain, ♪ One more minute of pain. ♪ If you're listening to this, you are listening to a currently and probably future Obscure podcast, so I'm assuming that you're on the internet too, and probably social media.

I know that that's supposed to be a bad thing, but like many people who are 30, yeah, boo, elderly on the internet, I cannot log out. I know that's a bad thing, and I know I'm supposed to to go and touch grass. But you know who tells you to go touch grass? People on the internet. And I just feel like they're not telling me that from the grass. 16th Minute is the podcast where I provide a thorough 16th Minute of Fame to someone who became famous online for a fleeting moment. Why? Because I want to understand what makes a Character of the Day, because I think that's a more complicated question than we give it credit for. This show is about characters of the day because I am not too good for social media. If I was going to get off of social media, I would have done it a long time ago by now. So gather round and let's learn about the Internet. My family couldn't afford a desktop until I was in the second grade, so I have some memories before being online, the most impactful of which was being kissed on the beach by a kid who, thankfully, was not my biological cousin, but I did call him my cousin, so I couldn't be sure of that at the time.

Anyways, Here's my operating theory. I don't believe the technology is making human beings worse, like a lot of headlines suggest. Human behavior and instincts haven't changed much, but the tools that we enact those instincts with have cranked up our ability to react with impact, positively or negatively, way up. Not to mention the speed that we can react. Late 20th century tabloids would really languish in reading their subjects to filth for weeks on end, and that's a far rarer experience today. Fifty years ago, it would be uniquely painful for someone who lives 5,000 miles away from you to ruin your day, career, life. But that is no longer true. And 50 years ago, you wouldn't have the instinct to do the same to someone else. People are just not built for it. But the people who live to tell the tale are very much worth talking to. I want this show to be a place that encourages you to see these people, the characters of the day, as people. And the rest I'll leave to you. Some episodes I'll be interviewing the characters of the day themselves. Some, I'll be talking to the people who made them characters of the day.

And others, I'll be zooming out a little to take a look at why the algorithm served us this person during this cultural moment and what that might mean. I've been making stuff since high school, mostly online. If there's anything I've learned in that time, it's that everything, including what you're listening to right now, is a piece of future lost media. Enjoy it or hate it while it exists. With that, let's get into our first character. First, a little scene setting. Musical transition. Oh, nice. Production. Come with me, if you will, to the year 2010. Black Swan, Shutter Island. Get Him to the Greek, a movie that, 15 years on, has an all-sex criminal cast. Twilight Mania has reached a fever pitch, but we're still a year from my mom asking me if I've heard of Fifty Shades of Gray, Waving Around her soggy library book. Like A G6 is playing at every school dance, and I lose my virginity this August, which was actually a really big deal to my friend group at the time. Thank you so much. 2010. We didn't know what a filthy, debauched decade we tapped into. Social media was becoming normal at this time, not just for young people, but for everyone.

2010 was the year my parents got on Facebook, reconnecting with high school sweethearts, beginning strange emotional affairs. Facebook had surpassed MySpace as the most popular social network on the planet back in 2008 and absolutely dominated. While smaller networks like Twitter, YouTube, and a then brand-spanking new app named Instagram, steadily grew in popularity. This character's journey, or should I say, these characters' journeys, started on YouTube and Reddit, but they wouldn't have become the cultural phenomenon that they did without every single one of those platforms working together. You can rarely attribute a person's 15-minute ascent to one social media platform, especially in the days of the early Internet. If you stick in one social media corner, that tends to be where you exist forever. July 28th, 2010 in the Lincoln Park projects of Huntsville, Alabama. Elsewhere, an Air Force plane crashes in Alaska, and bullfighting is banned in Catalonia. In Lincoln Park, a news team from local station WAF 48 goes to speak to a woman who just reported a man breaking into her home and attempting to rape her. The newscaster interviews her and her brother, who was at the scene of the crime and tried to apprehend the man, but the rapist got away.

Here's part of the clip.

I was attacked by some idiot from out here in the projects. Dodson says her attacker used a garbage can to climb onto the unit's ledge, opened the upstairs window, and then he got in bed with her. He tried to rape me. He tried to pull my clothes off. Dodson struggled with her attacker, knocking over items in her bedroom. Antoine Dodson heard his sister scream and ran to help. Well, obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park.

Well, wait, let's stop the clip because, yes, This clip sets a record for streams on WAF 48's video site, around 200,000 views at the time. It first started to gain traction when it got reposted to the r/funny page on Reddit. This is the age of the upvote, 93% of Reddit users seem to agree that the video clip was funny. Later that same day, someone reposted the news clip to YouTube. Remember, this was before most local news channels thought about having their own YouTube pages. But it's two days later, when a YouTube channel run by the Gregory Brothers, three biological brothers and a fourth member, Sarah, who's now married to one of the brothers, whose channel was and is called Schmo Yoho, posted an autotuned remix of this broadcast that one of the most infamous moments elements in Internet history began.

Well, obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park. He's climbing in your windows. He's next to your people off. Trying to rape him. So you need to hide your kids, had your wife, had your kids, had your wife, had your kids, had your wife.

The Dodson Sipplings, your 16th Minute starts now. This was a huge story, not just because of the clip, but because of how deceptively complicated the subject matter of the clip was. The discussions around Bed Intruder contained issues of gender violence, race, class, queerness, and just the general lawlessness of the early Internet. It's a fucking mire, and it's one I was really interested in. And while I think the Internet elected the main character of this story as Antoine Dodson, the Brother, it's important to note that this story was always about more than one person. First and foremost, Kelly Dodson, who was assaulted, and then her to her brother, Antoine Dodson, who came to her aid. Internet history doesn't really regard it that way, and I'm going to take a look at why in a bit, but it's hard to overstate what a gigantic deal this was in the summer of 2010. At the time of this recording, the Gregory Brothers clip, which is called Bed Intruder Song, all caps, three exclamation points, mind you, has 155 million views on YouTube, and the news clip, which was reuploaded two years later, clocks in at over 84 million views.

As I record this in 2024, it's very possible to become an internet character of the day without being cross-pollinated into every corner of the internet. There are stories that are thoroughly relegated to one platform. Some TikTok scandals never cross over into where the old folks are hanging out, and Earth-shattering conflicts from these still active Facebook users in the boomer contingency are unlikely to migrate anywhere else. Things weren't like this in 2010, and the why is a little complicated. The BBC predicted that there would be two billion people using the Internet by the end of 2010. In 2024, that number has ballooned to nearly five and a half billion current Internet users. The tools for viral success are wildly different. Facebook and Tumbler were dominant back then, where TikTok creates today's Internet Titans, with a million fallen social media networks in between. The way that stories, clips, and people go viral also works very differently now. As we're going to explore in this show time and time again, the front half of the 2010s were, for better or worse, driven by organic engagement between people. And in the last 10 years, we've seen the world online increasingly shaped by algorithms that show us what they think they can profit from.

Sales, sure. Engagement, yes. And your attention and emotional response from what the algorithm serves up. I know you don't need me to tell you this. We've all watched that Cordy Netflix documentary, It's an Attention Economy. Let's keep moving. I say it because in 2010, a lot of this stuff was still pretty uncharded, particularly with how fast these media cycles tend to go. The Gregory Brothers had been posting to YouTube for about a year when they first saw Antoine Dodson, after the WAF 48 clip was reuploaded from the news station's website to YouTube. The Brothers claimed to Fame at the time were viral news clips expertly remixed into songs. The series was originally called Autotune the News and was later changed to Songify This. And they still do it today. The most recent Gregory Brothers video is a songified clip from the recent Amazon Prime movie Ricky Steenicki about Dix. I didn't finish it. At this time, the Gregory Brothers had had one previous significant success on YouTube, another remix of a famous viral video of the day. You might remember this one. It was of a very enthusiastic man named Paul Yosemite Bear Vazquez, reacting to a double rainbow.

The Gregory Brothers remix sounded like this.

That's a full rainbow all the way. Double rainbow. Oh my God.

Double rainbow. It's a double rainbow. So at the time Bed Intruder dropped, the group's success wasn't unprecedented. Bed Intruder was their second big success in less than a year. And unlike a lot of social media stars, the Gregory Brothers had the talent and consistency to remain successful and adapt into today. They were also behind a very successful remix of a main character from 2022, one of my favorites, Corn Kid, who originally appeared on the online series Recess Therapy. Just talking about corn.

For me, I really like corn.

What do you like about corn?

It's corn. I too love Corn Kid.

So, the Gregory brothers have remained very attuned to who makes a viable internet character. But Bed Intruder made the brothers and Antoine Dodson, very, very famous. The first Bed Intruder remix video did huge numbers. It actually ended up being the most streamed YouTube video of 2010, closely followed by a Keisha parody and an annoying orange video just to remind you of the era we're in. After that, the Gregory Brothers released a full three and a half minute version of the song that was for sale on iTunes. This was when iTunes, Apple's paper song platform, was still a pretty viable business model. Still far less lucrative than physical media, which remained a major discussion at this time. But hey, musicians are doing even worse with Spotify residuals today. If music distribution online hadn't become this popular, Bed Intruder couldn't have broken into the mainstream in the way it did. The full song was hugely popular on iTunes, and even broke into the Billboard Hot 100, reaching number 3 on the iTunes' R&B charts, number 15 on the pop charts, and number 25 overall. So the Gregory Brothers are talented composers, and They're making videos about videos using the original subject's likeness and voice before there were any common practices online about that.

So my knee-jerk fear was that Antoine Dodson, who spoke to the media for free about fending off a man who attempted to rape his sister Kelly, never saw a dime for the huge viral success that was Bed Intruder. But that's not true. The Gregory Brothers said in an interview with Wired at the time, and Antoine Dodson confirmed to me that the iTunes iTunes revenue was split between the brothers and Antoine 50/50. Michael Gregory explains their reasoning to Wired all the way back in 2010. We're really breaking unintentional singing ground, so we're trying to set precedence by making it so that Antoine or whoever that artist might be in the future has a stake not only as an artist, but as a co-author of the song. It's like you said, he wrote the lyrics. He's the one who put it out there. What we are doing on iTunes and on any other sales, we are splitting the revenue after it gets through Apple down the middle. And that also applies if we ever license the song for TV or a movie. Whatever happens to the song, he has a 50% writing credit. And we have the same agreement with Paul Vazquez, co writer of the Double Rainbow song.

According to Dodson, the Gregory Brothers tend to have such a good relationship with their viral subjects because of this financial arrangement. And that was a subject of discussion online at the time. The most recent scandal about an internet viral figure never a dime from a heavily monetized YouTube upload was the singer Susan Boyle. And this prompted tech writers in the early 2010s to ask creators if the people they were pulling from actually got any financial kickback. This is a conversation that continues today, particularly in an algorithmically fueled ecosystem that still pushes white creators to Fame over anyone else. The Gregory Brothers are talented, but given that they're white people in Brooklyn, remixing a news broadcast about an attempted rape on a black woman in a poor area of Georgia in monetizing it, that was a question that needed to be looked at more closely. That's not to say there wasn't any criticism of the way that blackness, poverty, and sexual assault were all being trivialized by turning it into a song. Michael Gregory defended this to billboard in 2010, saying, It's taking a terrible situation and making at least something positive out of it. But the way the Datsuns were presented to the public by the media upset others because of the lack of control they had on how they were portrayed until they were already famous.

The news broadcast was through a white lens, and the parody was through a white lens, and some critics call that out. Baratunde Thurston of The Onion talked to NPR about how it sat poorly with him on All Tech Considered at the time, saying, As the remix took off, I became increasingly uncomfortable with its separation from the underlying situation. A woman was sexually assaulted, and her brother was rightfully upset. People online seemed to be laughing at him and not with him because he wasn't laughing, as Dodson fulfilled multiple stereotypes in one short news segment. But, Thurston notes, Antoine Dodson seemed to have a vested interest in bending the media narrative to his and his family's favor and not just letting the internet mill roll over him. Thurston continued, The creativity Unleashed has been amazing, and what mitigates my fears of people minimizing the gravity of the situation is how Antoine himself has responded and taken charge of his own meme. This is where I will ask for the first and not the last time, Where's Kelly? Kelly Dodson is all but absent in the Bed Intruder remix. Both the newscast and the song give major precedence to her brother Antoine.

But we'll get back to that point. What you need to know is that once Bed Intruder was posted, it was fucking over. Marching bands were covering this song. Haley Williams from Paramour and guys from punk bands I've never heard of were covering this song. Well, obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park.

It's running in your windows, it's snatching your people up, trying to rape it, so you need to hide your kid.

Hide your wife. Hide your kid. Hide your wife. Hide your kid.

Hide your wife. And hide your husband 'cause a raping is one out there.

You don't got to come- And yes, mocked the Dodson's vocal delivery, it went on and on. This story kept going and kept mutating. The Gregory Brothers were on the Oscars that year, songifying the biggest teen movies of 2010. Also, this was the year that Anne Hathaway and James Franco hosted the Oscars together for some reason. I memory hold that, so sorry if I reminded you that happened. It was weird. But Antoine Dodson seizes on this sudden burst of fame as well. He made a number of appearances during this stretch of time, but the most viral were ones where he leaned directly into the meme, notably performing the autotune version at the BT Hip-Hop Awards in 2010, right alongside Michael Gregory. Here's a clip.

Just then, a crime was committed on a 500 block of Webster Drive. We have an eyewitness on the scene now. Well, he's climbing in your windows, he's snatching your people up, trying to rape us, so you to hide your kids, hide your wife. Antoine Dodson and Michael Gregory, real talk, for real. I know that was messed up, but they were able to buy their mama a house and get them out the projects with that song right there. I don't know how long they going to live there. So go run and tell that homeboy.

That's Host Mike Epps at the end, referencing the fact that just three months after Bed Intruder went viral, the Dodsons were able to move out of the projects with the money not just from the song, but merch that Antoine sold featuring his image with slogans from the clip, We can find you. We've got your T-shirt, et cetera. And this goal of monetizing this moment came into focus for Antoine within days of the That Intruder song's release. Antoine Dodson was going to school for business and was very shrewd about controlling the narrative to his family's benefit from very early on. Less than a week later, he'd set up a website called Antoine's World, where he posted updates about the Gregory Brothers' songs, his merch, and the appearances and fundraisers he was holding. He told fans directly that money from these endeavors would be going to his family and to a juvenile diabetes charity. Unlike a lot of the viral stars we'll be covering on this show, Antoine Dodson had staying power, partially because he had an interest in staying in the spotlight. He would continue to appear in media and TV and film for years after this, including a lot of speculation about his sexuality that went through a number of unnecessary press cycles between 2010 and 2018.

Here's something. In 2014, and get ready for a wild one, there was a pay-per-view celebrity boxing match between Antoine and The Intruder. It gets weirder. This match was hosted by Kato Kaelin, who was the famous witness who testified at the O. J. Simpson trial in the '90s. It's a fucking madlib of an event. The man who called himself the Intruder, a man named Rashaad Cooper, gave an to al. Com implying that Kelly Dodson had been lying and made the entire rape attempt up. Here's that quote. She tried to do something I wasn't down for yet. All of a sudden, she got mad and bipolar and started throwing stuff trying to fight me. So I won't lie, I did hop out of that window. A mad woman, you don't play with them. Antoine won the boxing match, and his son was born two days later. Kelly Dodson made no comment on the fight and did not confirm that that was, in fact, the man who had attempted to rape her four years earlier. The last time the siblings appeared together in public was in 2021 on Judge Jerry Springer, one of those fake court shows before Jerry Springer died, where Antoine was suing Kelly for $750 over a personal loan.

From what I could find, this was the first time Kelly had made an appearance publicly in years. Here's a clip.

You're reasonably well known.

Tell me your story, Antoine.

Well, obviously, I need everybody to have their kids, have their wife, and have their husbands, too, because I'm showing everybody who owe me some money. Just plain and simple. I'm Antoine Donset, and I did the Had your kids video back in 2010. I made him famous. That's why he's well known.Oh, my God.You made him famous? Yes. No, she did not make me famous.I made him famous.That's why it's well known. Your Honor, I am so sick and tired of my family saying that. They say that all the time. Every time we get into an argument when it's about money or finances, it's, Oh, I made you famous. It was me. I'm the victim, and I'm just so tired of carrying this victim title. It I am the victim. The whole world know I'm the reason you're famous. Do we need to play this video clip? As the years passed, most of the public seemed to forget what Kelly is talking about here in 2021, the traumatic incident that prompted everything, all the way back in 2010.

So a decade on, Kelly's trauma is remembered less and less, and the fixation on Antoine Dotson's clip on WAF 48 is what stuck in the collective memory. And while the Gregory Brothers would continue to have other successes off of Autotune the News, they would often return to the well of Antoine when they would get work outside of YouTube. And there's no better example of that than in early 2015, when the band composed the theme song to the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt for Netflix, with not just the same cadence of the Bed Intruder song, but basically the same setup. So the clip is of a neighbor of the series protagonist, Kimmy, who is a survivor of an abusive underground cult run by Jon Hamm. But the theme itself is an to autotune the news clip. This neighbor is a black man named Walter Bengston, who lives in a trailer unknowingly beside this underground bunker. This character tells a local newscaster the following.

Mr. Bengston?

Oh, yeah. What had happened was I was outside talking about my grandson. When out of nowhere, 40, 100 police vehicles came walking.

So this moment in internet history continued to be really lucrative, all while the real story was slowly erased. And that erasure is not the fault of either Dodson's sibling. The real detailed story of what happened that day in 2010 was always available. Antoine Dodson spoke in both his sister Kelly and his community's defense extensively around the same time period that the BT Hip hop Awards and Tosh Pointeau were happening. So if I were to use my big old brain to take a guess here, these interviews were quickly forgotten because they don't lean into the image of the Dodsons that WAF 48 projected in that video, and including details about the attempted rape of Kelly Dodson would likely have made the gleeful enjoyment of this song seem pretty dismissive, but the interviews were always there. Here's Antoine on NPR the week the video went viral.

What do we need to do as people to keep our community safe? You know what I'm saying? Because nobody's talking about in that. I mean, the world knows, but here locally in Huntsville, it's like, okay, it's a joke. Everybody taking it to be a joke. It's funny to them. You know what I'm saying? I'm making their city look bad. I'm making their community look bad.

And when we come back, I got to speak with Kevin Antoine Dodson.

There's just so much noise out there right now, and we don't want to add to it. All we want to say is, visit Frankene, Volkswagen, to purchase your new or used Volkswagen car or commercial vehicle. You can be assured of an excellent experience and, oh, the best offers, of course. Visit franking Volkswagen in Liffey Valley and Sandiford or find out more at frankeenvoxwagen. Ie.

Hey, I'm Rachel Martin. You probably know how interview podcasts with famous people usually go, right? There's a host, a guest, and a light Q&A. On NPR's new podcast, Wild Card, we have ripped up the typical script. It's part existential deep dive and part game show. I ask actors, artists, and comedians to play a game using a special deck of cards to ask some of life's biggest questions. Listen to NPR's Wild Card on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Mother's Day is right around the corner, and in true She Pivots fashion, we're highlighting moms who've dedicated their lives and their pivots to supporting mothers. The iconic Christie Turlington will join us to talk about launching Every Mother Counts after pivoting from her '90s supermodel days. And later, the co-CEOs of Baby to Baby will share how they're addressing the needs for millions of babies and moms. So tune in and subscribe to She Pivots. New episodes out every Wednesday. Listen to She Pivots on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back to 16th Minute. I am a white woman with brown hair. So when I reached out to Antoine Dodson, I was not sure what to expect. And honestly, I most wanted to speak to Kelly Dodson, who had never been centered in a story about her reporting an attempted assault. But Kelly has historically resisted the limelight, which is an act of agency in itself. There's no way to contact her online at present. Antoine, however, did reply, and we caught up not just about his history as an internet celebrity, but about his whole life. So just so you're aware, this interview was over two hours long, so it's been edited for length and clarity. And I'll do my best to fill you in on what Antoine and I discussed between clips. On that note, I'm also going to place a trigger warning here for child sex abuse as well. Here's some of our talk.

Hey, I'm Antoine Dyson. I became famous from a local interview that I did here in Huntsville, where my sister was attacked and the shooter came into her home. Yeah, and that's how the fans know me.

What is life like for you right now? You're back in Huntsville for now.

Here is pretty... This is the South, it's pretty laid back. They got the country vibe, the soul cooking. You know what I'm saying? There's no paparazzi here. It's not a lot of work or entertainment here. So it's pretty laid back.

Is most of your family still in Huntsville as well?

No, most of my family is still in Chicago. I'm originally from Chicago, and I moved to Huntsville in 2004. And most of my family stayed back, and I'm the oldest of nine kids. Five of them and myself, we moved here in Huntsville with our mom. As far as back, I can remember, I was probably about five or six around that age, where my mother's mother, she was getting sick and she had diabetes, which gave her gangrene, so she had to get her leg amputated. So of course, with that, she had to go into a nursing home. And so my mama was left out there to fend for herself with two kids. So when my grandmother went to the nursing home, I remember my mama packing me and my sister up a bag. And I remember her putting us on a CTA, public transportation in Chicago. And she sat down with us and had this long... When you get to this house, don't touch nothing, don't say nothing. You stay close to me, don't break nothing, don't ask for nothing. You know how parents do before they tell you, because this is where we're going to staying.

So you just don't want to do a lot. So she gave us this whole list of things of not to do. And so when I got to the house, you know how you get this eerie feeling about something? I always called it the Candy Cane House because it was red and white, and it was our big mama, another part of our family. And I just remember it being real eerie. And I walked into the backyard with all family was at outside. It was drinking and smoking, loud, a whole bunch of folks out there clowning and stuff. So me being... I think I was five. But me- Oh, you're little. Okay. I was little because this is the beginning of all that trauma.

Once he, his mother, and Kelly moved into this pretty large communal family situation in Chicago, Kevin, that's what I'm going to call him because that's what he usually goes by. Antoine is his middle name. Kevin was sexually abused by his uncle repeatedly. And like many survivors of child sexual abuse, he was afraid and confused and did not report what was happening to his mom. He told me that this abuse continued for years.

But, yeah, this happened from five or six years old, all the way up until I was 14 when I ran away. I tried to commit suicide behind it and everything. Because my grandmother, the big mama of the family, was a mother for the state of Illinois. When she They had kids coming in and out. Kids will come in and out of the house, different kids. If she didn't want them, she would send them back there, send her a new set of kids, that type of house. Basically, a foster home.

Okay.

So, yeah, it was bad. It was really bad. A lot of things happened. I tried to commit suicide. The same thing happened to my sister, but at the time, I didn't know. I didn't know with Kelly. I didn't know that that was happening to her until we got older. We started drinking and conversations, people bringing up old wounds. And then I found out.

Kevin told me that his childhood was marked by abuse and attempts to run away, as well as struggling to navigate his own personal sexuality, and that this led to depression and hospitalization.

I found one of my uncle's pills. I took the whole bottle in the bathroom. I locked the door, and that's where I passed out of it. And so I woke up to My mother knocking on my mother, knocking on their door like, Kevin, are you okay in there? Because my first name is Kevin. So she was like, Are you okay in there? Are you okay in there? So I'm waking up and I'm like, damn, I'm busy. My stomach hurt, my head hurt. And so I opened the door, I said, Mom, I took all these pills. And so my mama just immediately started freaking out. She was like, Oh, my God. Why would you do that? No, you got to go to the hospital. And so I can tell that I'm getting real dizzy. So everybody was like, Take a mouth out on the front porch. He needs to get smaared, which was the worst thing that they could have done, because soon as that air hit me, I passed out again. And I woke up in an ambulance. I get to a hospital. Actually, it was a hospital that I was born in, Roseland Community Hospital.

So some days had went by and they was like, Mr. Dotson, we're going to have to release you and transfer refer you to another hospital because we've done all we can here for you. So I'm like, damn, this is weird. Not thinking that they're sending me to a fucking psych ward.

Okay. I mean, again, you're a kid. How are you supposed to know?

Right. So I'm thinking I'm getting ready to be released into the wonderful land of Oz. But I ended up going to the psych ward, which is closed now, but it's called Michael Reeve's Hospital. In Chicago. And so I'm there. And so I was there for three days. I guess they were doing observation and watching me recover and stuff. So after three days, they came in, the nurse said, Well, Mr. Dotson, you're being released. So I'm thinking, I'm being released to go home. And so they were saying, We're waiting on your... We notified your mother and we're waiting on her to come in. So when my mommy came in, they didn't Tell her that they wanted her to sign a release to commit me. And so my mama said, Oh, I'm not doing that. I'm not committing my son. And so the nurse said, Man, actually, we was doing it out of courtesy, but we really don't need your permission because this ass is going.

Really?

Yeah, they didn't need my consent. I guess the fact that I tried to commit suicide back there is called DCFS, Department in the Children and Family Services. Oh, okay. I see. So they didn't need her permission. So they took me to a mental institution where they really need to feel more crazy. You know what I'm saying? I told them what happened. I explained to them like, Hey, I only did this shit because I hurt somebody, and I'm being hurt in the same way. And it's from my family, but nobody believed me. And the hospital did not believe me. So much so that when I would act out, you know how when kids are, when you don't believe a kid, they begin to act out. So I began to act out and stuff, and they would put me a strait jacket, shoot me in my ass so I couldn't move. I'm telling you, This shit is very dramatic. It was really bad. But eventually, after being there for two or three months, I realized then the last month, I told myself, now I got to fake it until I make it because got me clowning here, fighting everybody.

They're going to keep me here. So I learned that, okay, I'm going to be more calm. As soon as I get out of here and I get to my mama house, I'm running away. I had created this whole plan in my head.

Once he was released, Kevin did soon run away from the house, only to be returned by the police after not being able to connect with his godmother. After this, he says that the abuse from his uncle escalated and that he was also trafficked two friends of his uncle as a teenager. This was in addition to his sometimes needing to buy his own food when the matriarch of the house wouldn't let him and Kelly eat regular meals. And it's here where Antoine comes into the mix.

Yes. So in my mind, all is going on with my uncle's, this is how I'm providing for myself to eat. So when you're in a situation like that, you become very creative. You start creating. For one, I had to create a hustle. I had to make sure that when my grandmother and them said that we couldn't eat, I had to find a way to eat. Because they did my cousins like that, and it was a lot of us cousins. So what we would do is we had this 24-hour grocery store. So what we would do, we would set up shop in the basement, and we would say, Hey, we're going to send you to go and get the snacks and the stuff, and we're going to be on the look out. So that's how we used to do it. We all used to take turns, not to mention, I created Antoine in my head. When my uncle used to get on top of me and stuff, I would go places in my mind. Because my family called me Kevin. But I knew that Kevin came with a lot of pain, a lot of trauma. He was very angry, was snap off in a heartbeat.

So I had to create a personality outside of that that brought me hope and joy and peace. And so I created this Antoine Dyson character. And Antoine Dyson, he was fun. He was funny. He made everybody laugh. I had to create this person to get out of this darkness. And this is why people know me today as Antoine Dyson. He still lives in me. And everybody say like, Oh, Antoine, you're so funny and stuff like that. You had to create this person out of pain. I didn't create this person because I loved him. You know what I'm saying? I didn't create this person to be a content creator. I created this person to escape reality. I thought, and so I was a celebrity. I thought that even from a kid, I would walk down the street to have my fake bodyguards behind me. I would do my hair like I do my own hair. I just really created this person to be this funny, comical person.

Right. So finally, Kevin ran away to live with his godmother for a few years to escape this cycle of abuse. And the first person he told that he was leaving for good was his younger sister, Kelly.

We just got mistreated a lot. They treated us so bad. And it got to the point where I had talked to Kelly when I was 14. And I said, Kelly, I can't do this no more. I said, Kelly, I can't do this no more. I'm tired of taking care of kids. I'm tired of going through this shit with this house. I'm tired of having to go still to eat. I'm so tired of it. I'm just tired of everything. And I just up and left. Up and left, and I never looked back.

And around his 18th birthday, a family member reached out to Kevin, Kelly, their mother and their siblings, and suggested a move to Huntsville, Alabama, where she lived.

Because my mother, when we was in Chicago, my mommy used to go to school for hair. And so they didn't want to be bothered with me and my sister. So at the school, they would make me and my sister walk to my mother's hair salon. And that's how we learned how to do hair. Yeah, so from 18 to 24 in Huntsville, that's what I was doing. I was doing hair. I was fried down, laying head to the side. I was making money doing that for everybody. And I was in college for cosmetology. And and business and management at Virginia College in Huntsville.

And then it happened. The day before the assault in 2010, Kevin and Kelly had gotten into a petty sibling argument, which led to Kelly punching Kevin and him leaving the house in annoyance. The whole family had just bought a bunch of frozen meat that was in Kelly's freezer. And so the story really begins when Kevin returns for his meat the next day.

And so the next day, I'm laying on my friend couch, and I'm like, damn, I forgot I got some steaks over there. So I went back over to Kelly house. I walked right in the house. I didn't say shit to nobody. I just walked in her kitchen, and she had those cheap dollar store friepads that burn in a heartbeat. So I'm cooking the steaks on her stove in her kitchen, and the gilet is burning. It's smoking the house out. So I I put the window in the kitchen. I cracked the window so it can ventilate the smoke. Now I got my hair just like how this is. So I'm taking my hair down. Kelly is like, What the hell are you doing in my house? And said, Now, that's it, girl. That was yesterday news. I'm over there, shit you. I got to apologize, girl. Fuck you. Let me take my head down and eat my damn steak. So I'm taking my head down as to how the red bandana came about because I had just took my head down.

Okay.

So I fell asleep on Kelly Couch. I fell asleep on Kelly Couch. And I was talking to my Auntie in Florida, and we was on Facebook. I had made some crazy-ass post of we talking shit. And she's like, You ain't no celebrity. So I'm like, Baby, you know I'm a celebrity. My bodyguards, they don't play that shit about me. They're going to come and get you. They're going to find you in Florida. This conversation has happened hours before the attack. I remember this was like one o'clock in the morning. But But as I'm laying down, I keep laying the phone on my chest. And when the phone vibrated on my chest, I lift it up and I take my Auntie. Well, I guess I fell into a deep sleep, and I started hearing this screaming and hollering in my sleep. I'm I'm like, What the hell? So I open my eyes and the screen is still continuing. So I'm like, What the fuck? It's pitch dark. The only thing that's going is the TV. And back in those days, we had this DVD, DVD player. And when you don't play a DVD, after so long, you know how TikTok logo bounce on the screen?

Yeah. Which gave a little light in the room. Okay. So I jump up immediately. I'm hearing her scream, and I'm seeing my other two sisters, and my niece, and my mother in the hallway. They out, they freaking out so bad. I'm talking about, I I was the only male in the house. It was so bad. So I bust open the door and I see a silhouette because the street light has shined in her window. So you could see the silhouette. I could see her silhouette on the ground and I could see the silhouette of a man on top of her looking like he had his hands around her neck. At that time, I kept really long... I keep long figure nails. I'm regrowing them now. So I just automatically took all my nails and I dug them in his shoulder and I snatched them and pulled them off and swung them into the hallway. And that's when he did this little basketball move and went under my arm and ran in the kitchen. Remind you, we're on the second floor. So I'm not thinking that he is jumping out of a window. I'm thinking he is going to go get a weapon.

We all get ready to die today. So I go in the kitchen. I'm like, Y'all, go in the room. Go in the room, lock the doors, call the police. So I'm getting ready to go into the kitchen. But I realized that my other sister has been trying to escape out of the apartment. So I'm like, Oh, my God, now she stuck here. So I grab her and I take her in the other room, and I get on the phone to call the police. I said, There is somebody in this house. I'm in the house with a whole bunch of living in Holland, freaking out women and girls, and everybody freaking out. And they was like, well, we're on the phone with your other sister right now, but we can't be on the phone with both of you all. I said, well, you can get off the phone with me. Stay on the phone and try to comfort her because they're freaking out.

And so at this point, everyone still thinks that he's in the house, but he's actually jumped out the window and no one knows it yet?

Right. Okay.

And it's the middle of the night, right?

2:00 in the morning, 2:30 in the morning.

Oh, my God.

Okay.

And so we see the police. The police pull up, but they didn't pull up with no light, no nothing. All they got, all you see is a bunch of flashlights going around. So that was my chance. So I opened the door. I said, Jayda, you're safe. I said, Stay here. You're safe. I'm going to go let the officer's in. I have to walk past the kitchen to get to the front door. So I opened the door. I said, He's in the kitchen.

Oh, okay.

Get that motherfucker. He is in the kitchen. They go in the kitchen and come to find out the window is wide open. I prepared myself to die that night because I knew I had to protect my sister. People don't understand the feeling that you get when you're preparing to die. I knew that he had went there to get a weapon or anything like that because it's just not registering that this dude jumped out the whole window. And I blame myself for it because remember, I told you I was cooking. I had left a window open. He used the city garbage can to get in the window.

Right. How is Kelly at this? Because she also has to protect her daughter. She was attacked. How was she in those moments?

I had now, and my sister She's a street girl. She is a hood girl. So when I see the fear in her and everybody just shaking profusely, I had never seen my family that scared in my life. And I just thank the police. I was just so happy. I was like, Thank you all for coming to save my family and stuff like that. And they escorted us all. But I watched Faridjic Files, I watched First 48. I said, I got some skin. I started, name it, shit. I'm like, I got skin. I got his my hands under my nails. He left his T-shirt in the house, and the T-shirt was wet from his sweat. So I'm like, I got a T-shirt, fingerprints and all from the window still. And so I went, back in those days, we used the yellow pages. Yeah, So I'm sitting there going through the yellow pages trying to find an investigator.

You went to detective mode?

I went in straight detective mode. I was up that whole... They escorted us off the property at about three stuff to four o'clock. So we all go to the house that I was staying at at the time. And so I'm sitting there going through the yellow pages, looking for an investigator, looking for an investigator. And finally, I'm calling everybody, and one man, he called me back, and he was like, Hey, oh, my God, I heard your voicemail, and I want to come and get the... You don't have to worry about no money or nothing like that. I want to come and get the evidence. I said, Yes, come on, I'll meet you at the apartment. So later on that day, I'll remind you, I was calling local news people, too, because I'm like, I just cannot rest. You know what I'm saying? Until this gets handled. But nobody's answering me from WASF. So when I get to the house, the investor investigator who was up. Now, at the time of the investigator pulling up, now the neighborhood is everybody upset. Now, everybody's saying like, Oh, this ain't happening to you all. I hear you all the trouble makers, you all bringing this dropper to the neighborhood.

So I'm arguing back and forth with the neighbor. So all this is happening at the exact same time. I'm arguing with the neighbor. I got the detective pulling up with the local news station, and I got the church bus telling me, Hey, here's a flyer, which is the paper I had in my hand. They're like, Here's the flyer for you to go to church. You can bring the kids and stuff like that. All this is going on.

So how did the local news find out? How did they find out?

The detective was cool with Elizabeth Gentle, and I guess he said, Hey, this is a story that this dude is like, he own one. When I talk, I speak with my body, expression. You know what I'm saying? I guess he felt that and he heard my voicemail and he like, Oh, yeah, you might want to cover this story. So she's covering with a mic. So while I'm arguing with the neighbor and Elizabeth walking up to me, she was like, Antoine, do you want to say anything about what happened last night? And And the lady still talking shit on the side. So I said, Yeah, well, obviously, I wasn't talking to dudes, to be truthfully honest. I was talking in response to the neighbor heard. So when she said the camera was on, it was so easy for me to be like, well, obviously, when you get through running your mouth, you all need to hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husbands, too, because they're raping everybody out here. Because what people don't know is The very next day, that same person tried to break into another person's house and do the very same thing.

Only she had a boy there who had a gun.

Okay. That's a question. That's something that I wanted to ask you. I'd love to talk to Kelly at some point as well, because I feel like there's so many different versions of who this person was, what his relationship was to everybody. From where you're coming from, who Was it?

I'm going to say I only said this a couple of times because I felt like it really didn't matter. But now that I'm older, it does matter. A couple of days before, remind you, my sister had just moved in this apartment. She wasn't even there a month. But a person that we had already knew that was out there had came and knocked on my sister's door and said, They've been talking about running in your shit. They said, You booming too hard, you boom in too hard? You moving too hard, you pushing too much weight, and stuff like that. They talk about coming in here, robbing you all or whatever. So of course, nobody is paying attention to nothing like that because you look at it as like, Oh, this is some hate and shit. Not thinking that it's going to actually happen, because a couple of days later after that visit, it really did happen.

Kevin admits he can't prove who he, Kelly, or anyone suspected was the man who assaulted her. But it wasn't a question the public had a lot of interest in at the time as it was. But he and his sister's lives changed pretty immediately once the news clip aired.

A bandituit almost destroyed us. I'm not going to lie.

What is that experience like? When do you start to realize this is a thing?

Okay, so after I did the interview with Elizabeth Gentsel, because that was in the morning time, Yes. And so later on that night, it air on local TV. And so everybody was hitting me up on Facebook and text me, and they're like, Oh, I just see your interview on the news. Boy, that's crazy as hell. You crazy than the Lord. And I'm like, I don't find this shit funny. What is funny about it? You know what I'm saying? This is still fresh. We all still scared and still looking over our shoulders. Not to mention the endless nightmares that I had to go through with my family, them having dreams about them coming in. You got to be blocking all the doors and the windows. It changed our life.

It's traumatizing.

So it airs that night. So I'm like, okay, cool. It's cool. And then somebody hit me up and was like, Oh, they put it on YouTube. You got 316 views. I'm like, Wait, what? I'm like, damn, are people really watching me like that? So I'm on YouTube. I'm watching it. And the next thing I know I'm watching it is 5,000 views, 10,000 views, 50,000 views, 500,000 views. I said, Oh, my God. It is so many people watching this shit. But why? You know what I'm saying? Then all of a sudden, I started getting people in box to me. They were saying, Hey, I want to bring you to my... Can you come? Make an appearance here. We'll pay you. We'll set you up in hotels and stuff. So I'm thinking, What the fuck is going on? I'm so confused as what is happening because this all has happened in one day. So I'm like, What is going on? I'm freaking out. And then I had a couple of people reaching out to me, trying to manage me and stuff like that. And so I was like, this one person had hit me up and was like, If you cannot meet your manager, if you can't meet a person in person and sit down and have dinner or coffee or lunch with them, then they shouldn't be your manager.

And so I was like, damn. So I ended up meeting with this one particular guy, which was Richard Figueroa, my first manager. And we went to a coffee shop, and he was like, look, I want to represent you. In Huntsville? In Huntsville. And so he was like, I want to represent you. You're everywhere. Everybody's talking about you. I think you need the proper management. Not to mention that he was going to the projects, looking for me and stuff, trying to find me because he felt like- Where did he come from?

Where was he based?

He was already based in Huntsville. See, these are the people who were managing Naomi Campbell and stuff like that. Naomi Campbell's old manager, who is Beth Bult, she was born in Huntsville, and so she was a supermodel back in her day. And so she's the one who discovered Naomi Noemie did Ashley Christie's first photos, and all these people. So it was a no-brainer to go with a person who was already familiar with management.

How soon after the clip airing does all of that happen? Is it pretty instantaneous?

It was immediately. It was like when I did the interview that morning with the investigator, by 12:00 that same Same night, I was already being talked about. And so the next day, that's when I started getting everybody hitting me up, saying they love the video and wanted me to come and make appearances and stuff like that. And the song had not been created yet. I was already used for the song. And so when they did, I guess, the Gregory Brothers, they did a clip of the song, and I was mad. I'm not going to lie. I was mad then, the motherfucker, because I thought that they were making fun because we still traumatized. You know what I'm saying? It was all in a couple of days time. I think the clip came out a week later.

Okay.

And they had such a good response to it, a heavy response. They came in and they said, Hey, we want to create a whole song. You know what I'm saying? We want to make sure you get compensated. We want to split everything 50/50. And we went into contract and they did the whole song. And once that song came out, Bared and Truth, it became a life of its own.

We are going to take a quick break and be back with Kevin Antoine Dotson after this.

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Welcome back to 16th Minute. Here is part two of my interview with Kevin Antoine Dodson.

It's not like there's really anyone to turn to to be like, Well, this is how it's done. You have to improvise as you go, right? There's no- Right.

And that's the hard time that I have because I just did a video just recently that went viral. And they still talk about that shit. That video go viral every other day. But they were saying, oh, he didn't take his lemons and make lemonade. But what people don't understand that I was the first viral person to go viral like that. So they didn't know how to market me. And I had so many networks. They would tell me, We don't know what to do with you. This has never happened before. We don't know how to market you. We don't know where to place you. All I know is that everybody wants you, but we don't know what to do with you. And after hearing that, I didn't even know what to do with myself at the time. How would you? Right. Right. But people swear up and down. They act like I had the guide to Fame, and I didn't. We did not know what to do. So when it all boils down, it was like we could no longer go to Kelly's house because fans will pull They would be out there waiting for hours because we were still cool with the neighbors.

And the neighbors, they were getting upset. They're like, Man, it's chaos out here. All these people pulling up in droves. You had people flying from other cities and states. You had people driving in, coming to that apartment. I'm talking about it was like a museum to them. So I sat with myself and I said, You know what? I can make something out of this. If these people are asking me to come here and there for some money, I can move us out of this situation. So I'm telling my family this shit, and they like, No, I don't think you should do it. I think this is dangerous, and stuff like that. I'm like, God, I don't care what you all say. I'm going to do it. I'm going to take this trip. I'm going to sign this contract with this manager because I feel like they can help me and put this into a perspective. They can help organize because I don't know what I'm doing. And that's how that happened. So I just went on to start doing my thing.

How did Kelly feel about that at the time? How are you? Because it's like you guys have to navigate this together as things keep going. How was she dealing with it? How did she feel? Did she have different instincts from you?

If you pay attention to the beginning of all that, me and Kelly was traveling together. We had the Tosh.0 together. We was doing videos together. We was doing all types of stuff together. But her boyfriend at the time convinced her, they're making fun of you all. They're not laughing with you all. They laughing at you all. And at the time, he had a little money. You know what I'm saying? So it was easy for her to say, Yeah, I'm going to ride with this dude. She I was like, Oh, with this dude, and I started traveling by myself. And she went on with her dude, and my mom and them, they didn't really have nowhere to go. My other siblings and stuff didn't have nowhere to go. So I went out there and worked. And when I made When I first check, I put them in a house.

Okay. Yeah. Because I was seeing that coverage from August of that year where I think you posted that you have this huge hit on iTunes, but you still live in the projects, and there's this dissonance to what's going on. So from your perspective, it's like, capitalize on the moment and improve the family's situation.

Right. And that's what I did.

Okay.

I mean, that makes total sense. Okay, so now you are making... I mean, does Bed and Truder become your full-time living at that point?

Yeah. Oh, my God. I couldn't go nowhere. I couldn't do nothing. It just became everything was about Bed and Truder. Every conversation I had, everything that was going on was making deals, was getting on the airplane, was living in hotels. See, I didn't get me a place to stay right away because now at this time, I'm traveling a lot. I'm not staying in... I'm in Huntsville no longer than two days. So it's easy for me to either go stay at my manager's house or go lay on my mama's couch, and then I'm back on the plane. You know what I'm saying? So yeah, very truly became my whole life for two years. See, what people fail to realize with me and Kelly, we're not new to trauma. Trauma has Like I explained, see, trauma has happened all our lives. So we know how to go through some shit, get back up, dust ourselves again, off, and try again. So it was never getting over the trauma. It was the fact of having a nightmare, seeing Kelly screaming out of her sleep, seeing her daughter scream out of her sleep, my mama screaming out of her sleep, my sister.

It was going through that and how to balance that all out because we're not used to... They say that everybody kept saying, You all need some serious counseling. You know what I'm saying? In our mind at the time, it's like, How could you talk to somebody who don't know you? You know what I'm saying? How could you... Which right now, me and you're talking, which is very therapeutic for me. I feel like I'm getting all this out because I rarely talk about the life from Chicago because everybody Everybody is so focused on 2010 on up. And now, since so much time has passed by, now everybody is asking, who is Antoine Dawson? We want to know more about Antoine Dawson. And I have been in conversations with Netflix, Lifetime, and I don't want to give too many details about my life because I would hate to wake up one day and see somebody that did a movie or Right.

Without your consent.

Yeah.

Yeah, about a story. Because even though it's trauma, my life story is good as hell. Kelly's life story is good as hell. And I'm telling you, it's going to make somebody a lot of money if they get it right.

Right.

Because the narrative was, I don't know if you remember, but the narrative was this was the set up for Fame. We did this to become famous. They really thought that this was some type of skit. And that was another thing that we had to fight, and that shit pissed Kelly off.

Yeah. Well, yeah. Because it's like that's just, again, discounting this traumatic, violent incident. Oh, that makes me so mad. I do remember that being presented. And I don't know. I went back yesterday and today and watched the original clip, and there's so much that I think a lot of it is because it didn't end up in the song. But the more upsetting parts of the clip, like the scene of the crime, there's so much included in that report, and it's just boiled down to these couple of quotes.

Nobody knew that we talked to WAFF. We was out there for hours talking back and forth, arguing with anybody. This went on for hours with the investigators and everything. But you know how we do in the industry. They shorten all the clips, and that's what you got.

How did the investigation... Did the investigation ever resolve?

As the time went on and I began to work and stuff like that, I can honestly say I did drop the ball with the investigation because now I'm trying to make this money. I'm trying to get us out this situation because none of us... We never really had shit in life. So I was trying to get something for them. Even if he never got caught, I wanted to make sure that I had something for us when all this wore down. And Yeah. We dropped the ball with that.

I mean, did it ever feel like during those early years that there was inherent racism, inherent homophobia to the way that you were being treated by the media?

Oh, my God. I'm so glad. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that because I've always been known for hair and shoes. I used to get my hair pressed out and wear wigs and weeds. Back then, that was not popular. They did not want that. I had one person who wanted me to be trans. They wanted to pick me on the trans side of things. And I was like, No, I'm not trans. I'm just a feminine, flamboyant boy who likes long nails, long hair. I like to be a pretty boy, but I know that I am a man. So they When I did get out here and work and stuff, they did not want the long hair, they did not want the long nails, they didn't want the flamboyant Antoine. They were not rocking. Fast forward today, you see all these men on the internet in wigs making a hell of a lot of money, and it is approved. Everybody, what's the word I'm looking for? It's accepted. Everybody is accepting it. I feel like I'm the blueprint of that.

To this day, Kevin has a good relationship with the Gregory brothers. He mentioned that when his mother passed away several years ago, the brothers helped him pay for the funeral. But what I found most interesting were Kevin's reflections on how things have changed online since he became prominent in 2010, particularly as it pertains to perception and compensation.

Well, I see that now, do you remember the #MeToo movement? Yeah. And stuff like that? See, now it had became open because in 2010, when you tell somebody that you got raped or sexually assaulted, it's like, Don't say that. Oh, no, my God. Don't say that. Don't do that. Now you got Ditty being exposed. You got all these different celebrities being exposed and stuff talking about and stuff like that. So I like to believe that Barna Tudor and that interview and stuff led to what's happening now. I believe that Barna Tudor is starting to bring, brought awareness It's to a lot of things, a lot of things that was happening.

So are you still in touch with the Gregory Brothers now?

See, when I just did that video that went viral, people had it in their mind that I wasn't getting paid for the song. And me and the Gregory brothers, we have a good bit. See, they thought when I did that interview, I was not talking about the song because most people use the clip, the news clip, which is owned by WAFF, and they use my likeness, not necessarily the song. And that's what I was telling them. Like, look, you all made so much money off of that interview. You know what I'm saying? The only money that I made off of that interview alone, I made $60,000 off of that interview in 14 years because WFF owns it.

Where did Where did that number come from?

That's the money that I made overall from the interview alone. That's not the Bad & True song. Because with the I don't understand that interview has been in movies. It has been in TV shows, it has been in commercials, it has been in people's commercials for their businesses, and I never seen a dime of that. I know that it generated a lot money.

They're licensing the clips.

Yes. And I don't know if WFF is getting paid because somebody brought something to my attention. They were saying, You know the WFF got paid for your video on YouTube. When they put it on YouTube and got all a millions of views off it- Monetize it. They got to check for that. Yes, I didn't. I didn't go viral on my page. I've never went viral on my page. What people don't understand is I have been going viral every other month for the last 14 years on other people's pages. And I have watched people make bread. I have watched people, and I know that these apps make money. And when you see Antoine Dotson, if you see a video of somebody doing Antoine Dotson and using my likeness in that video, and you got 10 and 15 million views, I know that you're making money from... I'm not dumb. Of course. I know that you're making money from that. And nobody say, well, here's a cut. Here's $5. You know what I'm saying? I appreciate you doing a band and Truda or whatever. But the Gregory brothers have always been full. They have always been good to me.

I'm still living off of band and Truda's song money.

Okay.

And I have a good relationship with them. We travel together when we want to perform. I got to tell you this story real quick. It's so funny. It's quick. We was at BT Awards. No, not BT Awards. We was at 106th Apart. The Gregory Brothers, all them are brothers and sisters, and they got a wife that's apart who sing. We was in a dress room. She walked in a dress room. She was like, Assa, oh, my God, this is such a dream come true to sing Bed and Children. They're Climbing in your Windows at BT. I was calling because they're white. So it was so funny. Every time we get together, it was so funny.

And in spite of it all, Kevin is still online today, making regular content for TikTok, either commenting on the news or reflecting on his career as an influencer. And if you happen to be a prospective or recovering character of the day, here's his advice.

To be successful So in the Internet, because I noticed with a lot of Internet stars after me, nobody really... They burn out very fast. Two to three months, and they're done. So it's been 14 years for me because I never shied away from who I truly was or who I truly am. I always try to stay as close as to who I am as possible, because when you start doing all this crazy shit for clicks, you burn out. And then you don't have to do videos every day, all day. You burn out like that. There's a balance to this in and that stuff. For one, you have to be authentic. And I noticed that everybody is biting off to each other. Everybody is doing the exact same thing, and they're burning out. My advice is be authentic. Be as authentic as you can possibly be, because that is going to take you far.

So talking with Antoine or Kevin, as he goes by in his personal life, was completely surreal. I wasn't expecting to be star struck in the way that I was, but he is someone who has lived in my mind for a decade and a half, and it's a very particular celebrity encounter. I want to thank him for his willingness to be open with me about his childhood as well as his experience becoming internet famous. And you can check out what he's up to now at the links in the description. Understanding Kevin's life better really helped pull this story into focus for me. But there's still that element that never quite sat well, that the further this story got away from the public, the less we heard about Kelly Dodson. What the fuck is that about? We're going to talk about that in part two, next time on 16th Minute. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, posted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftis. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13.

And pet shoutouts to our dog producer, Anderson, My Cat's Fleeing, Casper, and my pet rock bird, who will outlive us all. Bye.

There's just so much noise out there right now, and we don't want to add to it. All All we want to say is, visit Frankkeen Volkswagen to purchase your new or used Volkswagen car or commercial vehicle. You can be assured of an excellent experience and, oh, the best offers, of course. Visit Frankkeen Volkswagen in Liffey Valley and Sandiford, or find out more at frankinevolkswagen. Ie.

Hey, I'm Rachel Martin. You probably know how interview podcasts with famous people usually go, right? There's a host, a guest, and a light Q&A. On NPR's new podcast, Wild Card, we have ripped up the typical script. It's part existential deep dive and part game show. I ask actors, artists, and comedians to play a game using a special deck of cards to ask some of life's biggest questions. Listen to NPR's Wild Card on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Imagine you ask two people the same seven questions.

I'm Minidriver, and this was the idea I set out to explore in my podcast, Minidriver.

This year, we bring a whole new group of guests to answer the same seven questions, including Courtney Cox, Rob Delaney, Liz Fair, and many, many more.

Join me on season three of Miniquestions on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Seven questions, limitless answers.