Chris Brown Backflips Into Israel

It’s not often I get to write about Chris Brown here on the Scroll, and that’s fine by me considering his record of domestic violence, alleged homophobia, and generally bad music. But it’s just so happens that Brown, 26, will be performing in Tel Aviv tonight, with tickets going for a reported NIS 399, or a touch over a hundred bucks, despite a call to boycott the performance over his 2009 assault of Rihanna, then his girlfriend.

Today, Brown did gymnastics at the beach. Maybe he sipped a mango smoothie afterward. Maybe he even felt a connection to a sea shell, like one of those perfect ones, and stored it in his pocket.

But, apparently, it’s been an arduous task for Brown to even get his clique-packed private plane to Israel. First, after performing in Manila last Tuesday, Brown was barred from leaving the Philippines after “the politically-connected Christian group Iglesia ni Cristo filed a fraud complaint against him,” reported The Times of Israel. “The group said it was owed a million-dollar-plus refund after he failed to show up for a concert sponsored by them last year.”

Lebanon’s The Daily Star reported that Brown, in a video posted to his Instagram account that was later taken down, said from his knees, “Please, please, let us leave, please.” Then he performed a backflip.

He also appeared to send a thinly veiled distress signal to U.S. President Barack Obama as he captioned the Instagram video post: “OBAMA!!!!!!!!!!” In two subsequent Twitter posts Brown said: “This is a very serious situation and someone needs to be held accountable for mixing my name up in all this. I’ve done nothing wrong!!!” “I have nothing to do with anything going on right now. I came back to Manila to do a make-up show for New Years. I did the show three years ago,” he said.

It appears that these posts were taken down from Twitter. (To be Chris Brown’s social media manager…)

By Friday the singer was cleared, and it was on to Macau (tough life). As he was leaving, he posted a video, ending with: “Tel Aviv, here we come.”

A video posted by @chrisbrownofficial on Jul 26, 2015 at 2:40am PDT

After Israel, Brown is reportedly playing shows in Beirut, Cyprus and the Netherlands.

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