The nine-month hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck has come to a screeching halt. Trapt’s Twitter account was finally suspended after frontman Chris Taylor Brown vehemently defended underage sexual encounters between teenage boys and adult women.
As the COVID-19 pandemic began to ravage the planet, Chris Taylor Brown became one of the most inflammatory users on Twitter by defending President Trump’s COVID response, blaming George Floyd for his own death, threatening to fight or sue countless Twitter users, supporting neo-fascist group The Proud Boys and more.
Brown’s Proud Boys support got Trapt removed from Instagram and Facebook, but Twitter didn’t take action until the musician began publicly defending statutory rape. It all began with a tweet from the Ill Tempered Podcast, which kicked off a back-and-forth:
“A 15 year male and a 25 year old female is not pedophilia, you fucking moron,” Brown later tweeted. “I wouldn’t care if a 15 year old boy banged his 25 year old teacher. That’s it…”
“I would be giving the kid high fives!” Brown continued in yet another tweet. “Only if the teacher was hot though… So much worse when a grown man does that with a 14 year old girl. They get much tougher prison sentences, so society agrees with me. As long as the kid wasn’t sad about it. I mean the teacher could break his heart and that would be sad.”
By the psychological definition, what Brown describes does not constitute pedophilia, but ephebophilia, which is defined as “the primary interest in mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19.” Pedophilia is defined as an adult’s sexual interest in a prepubescent child or children, generally ages 13 years or younger. However, the incidents Brown defends do fall under the legal definition of statutory rape.
“Only horrible human beings think a 5 year old boy and a 15 year old teenage boy, who had gone through puberty, go through the same thing when an older man or woman takes advantage of them. Every one of you saying that the pain of these two should be the same is an asshole… What priests have done to little boys is not the same as the stories we’ve heard about teachers in their mid 20’s with 15 year old boys who’ve gone through puberty! Anyone making this equivalency is an asshole,” Brown wrote.
Brown is incorrect about 15-year-old boys having “gone through puberty.” Puberty begins and ends at different stages for each individual, but normally occurs between the ages of 12 and 16 for boys. The attraction to a pubescent child is often defined as hebephilia, which has been labeled a crime rather than a mental disorder by Psychiatric Times.
Dozens of similar tweets filled Trapt’s feed on Dec. 6 and 7, only to leave Trapt’s Twitter account suspended on Dec. 8.
If you or a loved one is the victim of sexual abuse, please consider seeking professional help or calling/instant messaging RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline for confidential, 24/7 support.