No Snitching Bitches!

This is a thought provoking (and sad) article on violence in hip hop and women who refuse to speak out about it. I don't /cannot buy into that whole "no snitching" mindset but apparently the unwillingness to report domestic violence is part of it.

Big Pun--born Christopher Rios on Nov. 10, 1971 in the Bronx, N.Y.--was a 697-pound platinum-selling solo rap artist who died in 2000 at the age of 28 from a heart attack.

After his death, his widow, Liza Rios, chronicled their stormy relationship and the physical abuse that began when she was 16 years old in the 2002 documentary, "Big Pun: Still Not a Player," which she co-produced and which included footage of Pun pistol-whipping her.

The documentary did not earn Rios many friends in the hip hop community. When she tried to recruit hip hop stars to perform in a fundraising tour to benefit programs to fight domestic violence, her calls went unanswered, according to various reports in hip hop publications.

The documentary did, however, turn journalist Elizabeth Mendez Berry into a Rios fan.

"I think Liza is a hero," says Berry. "She could have been a tragic first lady of hip hop but she decided not to be . . . She could have been sort of 'a first widow,' a woman who gets sympathy galore because of her fallen (husband) and who doesn't rock the boat."

Instead, Berry found that Rios, unlike many hip hop women, was willing to break an unwritten rule about "not snitching" on the domestic violence in the personal lives of rap stars.

After some initial difficulty reaching Rios, Berry interviewed her for an article about domestic violence in the March 2005 issue of VIBE, the New York-based hip hop magazine ...

read the rest ...