Chris Brown faces brighter, nastier spotlight

On Monday, Chris Brown’s lawyer struck a plea deal in his assault case. Brown pleaded guilty to felony assault and received a sentence of five years of supervised probation and six months of community labor.

But that is only one area of concern for Brown.

Robert Rosen, a photographer who tried to snap a photo of Brown while the R&B star played basketball at a health club, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court, claiming he was roughed up by one of Brown’s bodyguards. Said Brown’s attorney Mark Geragos at the time:

“This is a specious and frivolous lawsuit by one of the paparazzi seeking publicity and a payday. He’s done this before and lost. We will vigorously defend against this.”

Whether the photographer’s lawsuit has merit or not will be sorted out in court. But the timing is interesting. The incident with Brown and Rihanna took place on Feb. 8. The one with Rosen happened on March 13. That’s less than five weeks from one legal difficulty to another.

Obviously, that pace has not continued. Brown hasn’t been slapped with one lawsuit every five weeks or so. Yet the suit serves as a warning to Brown — and to anyone else in a similar predicament — of what may be to come as he tries to rehabilitate his image.

“He’s gained notoriety now,” said Glenn Gamboa, music critic for Newsday. “Like Kanye West at LAX, if you’re a big star whose photos can bring a lot of money to the paparazzi, they’re going to antagonize you anyway they can. He’ll just have to expect that.

“The antagonism will get extra ugly as the trial proceeds.”

In the case of hip-hop megastar Kanye West, he was charged earlier this year with misdemeanor battery, grand theft and vandalism in connection with the destruction of a photographer’s camera while at Los Angeles International Airport last September. West’s road manager, Don Crawley, was also charged in the incident.

But while West had not been charged before in any such incident, he developed a reputation for being hot-tempered. He blasted President George W. Bush in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and also complained in an expletive-filled rant after he failed to win anything at the MTV Europe Music Awards.

Sold as ‘the antithesis of R Kelly’
Brown, by contrast, had achieved the best of both worlds in music: He had a clean-cut image, yet was also respected by edgier factions of the business for his talent.

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“His handlers and the people around him did a very good job in his career of walking that fine line with him,” noted Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American studies at Duke University and the author of “New Black Man.”

“Clearly,” he added, “they sold him as a mainstream pop artist, the antithesis of R Kelly. But they also knew he had to have street cred to cross over in a significant way.”

But Neal said after the Rihanna incident, he may have stepped over the line into bad-boy hip-hop territory, and he will now have to accept the negative consequences of being hounded by outsiders.

“It will happen more so than it did before the incident,” Neal said, referring to potential paparazzi and fan confrontations. “That’s just the reality of the new notoriety he has.”

Neal feels that one of the best tactics Brown can do for himself now is step out of the public spotlight. “He needs to disappear,” Neal said. “That’s one of the things I give R Kelly credit for. He disappeared. You didn’t see R Kelly at a club.

“For Chris Brown, that’s part of the recovery process. He has to take the right kind of movie roles, recording jobs, focus on his talent, but he has to also better manage his personal life. The less people who have access to his personal life, the more he’ll advance in his professional career.”

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