By now, you have heard and seen your prospective social media feed light up with stories about Los Angeles Lakers rookie guard D’Angelo Russell video taping teammate Nick Young’s alleged confession to cheating on fiancee in rapper Iggy Azalea.
In doing so, Russell inadvertently became the most second-hated African-American to reside in the Los Angeles area. While Christopher Darden’s crown is safe, thanks to the constant 24-7 life of social media, you’d swear that Russell was O.J. Simpson. What is the bigger–and most underlying–issue that everyone appears to be ignoring is the fact that Russell violated the personal privacy of Young in recording him with his knowledge, consent or permission, and then leaking it.
While Young did confess that he was cheating on Azalea, such a candid admission should have never been recorded in the first place. What role and reason why Russell did this is irrelevant, as the main point in that doing so, he violated every unwritten man-law in violating the sacred “guy code”.
Much like the popular MTV series of the same name, Russell is his own employer’s biggest persona non grata, as his own teammates have all but shunned him, Lakers fans booed him vehemently during the Laker’s 102-100 overtime win over the visiting Miami Heat as if he was a planted Boston Celtic mole and the sad part is, is that he is the Lakers standard-bearer of the future.
The No.2 overall pick out of Ohio State, Russell has the talent and skills to be the face and future of the storied Purple and Gold, but for all of his talent, recording a private confession of a teammate is not something that a “face of the franchise” should be doing.
Perhaps Russell’s actions are the result of the smart-phone, over-sharing, need-to-know world we live in, that he felt the need to record his “teammate”, but why do it in the first place? Personally, it’s no one’s business but Young and Azalea’s about the in’s-and-outs of their relationship, and if he was indeed cheating on her–for which he is a idiot to do so–then it is a private affair between those two.
Not his, and certainly not anyone else.
I am not letting Swaggy P off the hook here either, as cheating in a relationship is never okay, let alone with someone as hot as Azalea, but if she does end up dumping him, it is his own damn fault for doing it in the first place, not Russell for recording it.
There are two guilty parties here in Young for cheating and Russell for violation one’s privacy, both are guilty, and both must pay the consequences for their actions. It’s sad that it took a privacy-invading recording for such a transgression to be revealed, but in Hollywood, the camera is always rolling, until the director yells, “Cut!”
Not even Tinseltown could ask for such a juicy reality show drama such as this.