One of the most controversial episodes of The Boondocks is back in the spotlight after an actor filed a $260 million lawsuit against Tyler Perry alleging sexual abuse.
Boondocks actor, producer, and executive producer Carl Jones posted a clip from the show to Instagram on June 17, from the episode about a media mogul who secretly leads a “homoerotic evangelical cult,” per the official description.
Jones skipped a caption, but added watching eyes emojis and the hashtags #tylerperry #derekdixon #theboondocks.
Related: Tyler Perry Accused of Sexually Assaulting, Sending Suggestive Texts to ‘The Oval’ Actor
Derek Dixon is an actor who played “Dale” on 85 episodes of BET’s The Oval. Dixon filed a sexual harassment, sexual battery, sexual assault, and workplace harassment lawsuit against Perry on June 13, but it didn’t make headlines until TMZ broke the story on Tuesday.
Dixon alleged Perry has a pattern of “using his power and influence to molest, abuse, and sexually assault impressionable and vulnerable employees and actors.”
Perry’s attorney Matthew Boyd issued a statement denying the allegations and accused Dixon of trying to cash in.
“This is an individual who got close to Tyler Perry for what now appears to be nothing more than setting up a scam,” Boyd said. “But Tyler will not be shaken down, and we are confident these fabricated claims of harassment will fail.”
The Boondocks was based on Aaron McGruder’s comic strip offering unfiltered takes on race, politics, and pop culture — and it ran from 2005 to 2014 on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block.
Back in 2010, there was an episode titled “Pause.” It followed a Tyler Perry-like media mogul named “Winston Jerome,” who cast “Granddad” (John Witherspoon) in his upcoming play “Ma Duke Finds Herself a Man.”
Winston didn’t look like Perry, but his cross-dressing “Ma Duke” character was similar to “Madea.”
While Winston spoke openly about his Christian faith, behind closed doors he surrounded himself with bare-chested, muscular men.
After he hired Granddad, the mogul dropped his pants and got real.
“Look man, all bulls–t aside. Can I please just have some a–?” Winston said in the resurfaced clip.
Granddad was shocked. “Wait a minute. You mean to tell me you made up this whole cross-dressing Christian cult crap, just so you can sleep with men?” he asked.
“Uh, pretty much. Yeah,” Winston responded.
In June 2010, the Los Angeles Times published a story saying Tyler Perry “was furious” about the episode. The paper reported Cartoon Network’s parent company, Turner Broadcasting System, was in a “house of pain” with Perry, whose shows House of Payne and Meet the Browns aired on the TBS network at the time.
Last year Carl Jones, who posted the clip on Instagram, did an interview on the VLAD TV YouTube channel and said Perry would have hated the episode even more, the way it was first written.
“Originally, the character’s name was Tyler Perry and he looked exactly like Tyler Perry. That was the rare moment where Adult Swim was like, ‘you can’t do that,'” he recalled.
Jones said the writers changed the character’s name to Perry’s birth name of Emmitt Perry, but the network nixed the change and warned the writing staff not to use Perry’s name or likeness.
“They called us, kind of screaming at us,” he said. “So we changed it to Winston Jerome. We made him look different and the episode aired, and, at least the way it was told to us by the network, Tyler himself called and said, ‘You guys better not ever air that s–t again.’ At the time, he had a lot of shows at TBS. We were just a small little Black cartoon and Tyler Perry was god.”
So where did the idea for the episode come from?
Jones claimed Gary Anthony Williams, who played Uncle Ruckus on The Boondocks auditioned for one of Perry’s films, and allegedly brought back wild stories from the set.
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I wonder what this producer knows.