Afroman got high this week—on free speech, that is.
As a slew of enthusiastically delivered social media updates have likely informed you in recent days, Joseph Foreman, a.k.a. Afroman, found himself at the center of a brewing legal headache after being sued by deputies in Ohio in connection with the “Because I Got High” artist’s very public response to their 2022 raid of his home. Fast forward to 2026, and Afroman, wearing an American flag-emblazoned suit and glasses, was in court over the defamation claims.
Proceedings ultimately ended in Afroman’s favor, but not without some unforgettable in-court moments (and some tears) along the way.
Below, we break it all down.
Afroman’s home hit with raid by Ohio deputies
Though no charges were ultimately filed, Afroman, as he explained to TMZ at the time, had his home raided by the Adams County Sheriff’s Office in Ohio in 2022 in connection with a warrant on suspicion of drug trafficking and kidnapping. The 51-year-old not only criticized the circumstances of the search itself, but also said that an estimated hundreds of dollars’ worth of cash was missing when he attempted to retrieve the temporarily seized funds.
Afroman hits the booth to mock deputies, to hilarious effect
This is where Afroman begins to Afroman like he’s never Afromanned before. In response to the 2022 raid, Afroman started sharing new tracks (and accompanying music videos comprised of home surveillance footage) publicly mocking the deputies.
In one, titled “Will You Help Me Repair My Door” and released in December 2022, he zeroes in on a shot of a gun-gripping deputy seemingly glancing at a cake in his kitchen, coupling the footage with the lyric “Would you like to have a slice of my lemon pound cake?”
In the same track, he questions the nature of the search warrant—“The warrant said ‘narcotics and kidnapping.’ … Are you kidding? I make my money rapping”—and inquires as to whether deputies found “any kidnapping victims inside my suit pockets.”
Additional tracks followed, including as recently as this week.
Afroman comes out on top in lawsuit, declaring his victory a win for “freedom of speech”
During testimony in Ohio court in March 2026, Afroman’s 2000 hit “Because I Got High,” featured on his album of the same name, was mentioned. During questioning, the song was erroneously referred to as “But Then I Got High,” no doubt an egregious error, which prompted a polite correction from the artist.
Elsewhere in the testimony, Afroman was asked if he felt “angry and upset” about the 2022 home raid.
“I wasn’t happy,” he said.
This led to a follow-up question connecting his unhappiness to what he shared online in the wake of the raid, at which point Afroman, as seen in the WCPO 9-shared video below, detailed what he argued was the crux of this entire saga.
“I posted it because the sheriff was never supposed to have raided my house in the first place,” he said. “The whole raid was a mistake. All of this is their fault. If they hadn’t wrongly raided my house, there would be no lawsuit, I would not know their names, they wouldn’t be on my home surveillance system, and there would be no songs, nothing.”
The proceedings resulted in one deputy breaking into tears while a satirical video mocking her was played in court, while another deputy was forced to concede that he did not know whether people would genuinely believe that Afroman had slept with his wife, as had been jokingly claimed in a song mocking him.
As you know by now, Afroman came out on top in the suit. He celebrated the victory by declaring it a victory for “freedom of speech” at large. While the deputies had pushed for millions in damages, per the Associated Press, their claims failed to land in court against Afroman’s First Amendment-citing counterargument.
To add to the sheer hilarity of it all, a different Adams County Sheriff’s Office—one in Colorado, not Ohio—has been tasked with issuing a statement in response to misdirected trolling efforts.
As one commenter joked in response to the Colorado department’s earnest message of clarification, perhaps those mistakingly targeting the wrong department with such efforts did so because, well, they got high.
