R&B singer Sammie says the storyline behind Sinners feels familiar for a reason: it came from him.
During his recent appearance on Cam Newton’s Funky Friday Podcast, the R&B singer explained that many of the emotional beats in the project weren’t written from imagination—they were pulled directly from what he was living through at the time.
He told Newton that the film’s central conflicts reflect patterns he’d been working to break in real life. “I’m attracted to chaos because it’s normal to me,” he said during the interview. “Although I love peace… I’m used to verbal abuse. I’m used to violence. Don’t like it. Don’t want no parts of it, but it feels like home to me.”
According to Sammie, the relationship unraveling depicted in Sinners mirrors the period when he was confronting long-standing habits and painful dynamics.
“The only thing I’ve ever failed at in life is love, because that’s a team sport,” he told Newton, adding that both the film and his personal life involved two people “bringing out the worst in one another.”
Sammie also addressed the public controversy that unfolded around the same time, including his recent arrest in Georgia. Online records listed multiple charges, but Sammie said the most serious-sounding allegation was widely misunderstood.
“If you have a public dispute… in front of children, that’s considered cruelty to children,” he said. “No child was touched. No child was harmed.”
He described the situation as a verbal argument with the mother of his child. He clarified that the only physical contact involved was him holding her arms to stop things from escalating. “I grabbed her arms so it couldn’t go no further,” he said.
What the public didn’t know, Sammie continued, was that he learned he needed to get to Charlotte for the birth of his son immediately after being released. “By the grace of God, I was released… to go to Charlotte to give birth to my newborn son,” he said, explaining that the timing intensified the emotional fallout that followed.