Logic Reveals He Was Sexually Abused at Age 9

Rapper Logic described his horrific experience of child sexual abuse in a new excerpt from his upcoming memoir This Bright Future. Logic — whose real name is Bobby Hall — will reportedly describe years of abuse and neglect in his new book and how they led to his success in the hip-hop music industry. The latest teaser for that story is a clip from the audiobook narrated by Hall, explaining how he was sexually abused by his father’s girlfriend Donna when he was 9 years old.

As Hall tells it, he was eating Skittles in the laundry room at his father’s home when the attack took place. He described Donna as “the crypt keeper from Tales of the Crypt but with a Van Halen hairstyle,” and continued: “I don’t remember exactly how it happened but she was definitely drunk and she walked over to me and she took some of my Skittles and she put them in her mouth and she said, ‘Hey, come here.’ So I walked over to her and she leaned down and she passed the Skittles from her mouth to my mouth, which then turned into her tongue-kissing me. It was more than one Skittle — I could really taste the rainbow and the cigarettes and the ginger ale and the lipstick, like all of it at the same time.”

“I look back as an adult and obviously it was wrong and creepy and weird, but I won’t lie. As a kid, I was like, ‘Awesome! Nice!’” Hall admits. “which is this weird double-standard we live with where if any man does anything, it’s abuse, but if it’s some hot lady teacher, it’s somehow not as bad, even though it is.”

Hall has previously alluded to his experience with sexual abuse and domestic violence both in his lyrics and in interviews. In a 2014 interview with Complex, he said that he had grown up seeing his sisters and his mothers suffering at the hands of men they were involved with. He said that he felt lucky that he had not internalized these experiences and replicated the cycle of violence in his own life.

“I think it was just who I was and God,” he said at the time. “When I saw my mom getting her ass whooped by various men right in front of me or it was sitting in the same room as my sisters getting sexually assaulted as a little child and I couldn’t do anything… It’s crazy that that didn’t make me go out and put my hands on women.”

Hall, 31, is best known for his music including six studio albums and several mixtapes. Some of his biggest hits have been extremely topical, including a song titled “1-800-273-8255” – the number for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. He also creates YouTube videos, livestreams about video games and has written one other book before — the 2019 novel Supermarket. His memoir, This Bright Future will be available in print, digital and audiobook formats on Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2021.