Suggesting that he might not have a perfect grasp of how to show respect to an ex and her attempts to get on with her life—or possibly that he’s just watched Love fucking Actually too many goddamn times—rapper Offset decided it would be very cool to crash his separated wife Cardi B’s headlining set at Los Angeles’ Rolling Loud festival last night, begging her to take him back. The intended “romantic gesture” does not appear to have gone to plan; although she later issued a series of requests to fans asking that they not rip Offset apart for the bone-headed move (“At the end of the day, that’s still family”), Cardi doesn’t appear terribly happy about it in video of the incident, which sees his “Take Me Back” props get swiftly cleared from the stage. Her stage.
The most upsetting thing about this whole debacle, though, is that—as noted by our sister site The Root (and a whole bunch of folks on Twitter)—Rolling Loud appears to have known that something was up with Cardi’s set, having since deleted a post in which they suggested the evening was likely to go “viral.” Which is, if true, incredibly fucked up, since it’s pretty clear that, of the people who knew what was coming on that stage, Cardi herself—who was, again, trying to do a show that’s a milestone for her rapidly escalating career—wasn’t one of them. That’s a hefty violation of the basic protections a performer can hope to expect from a venue they’re performing at, and it’s a real bummer that people might have conspired to take that moment away from her in the interest of “going viral.”