Erykah Badu raised some eyebrows in an interview with Vulture after she seemingly expressed empathy for Adolf Hitler after being asked about accusations that she’s anti-Semitic. The wide-ranging interview covered a broad number of topics but took a bizarre turn after she was asked about the criticism she faced following 2008 trip to Israel where she says she followed Nation of Islam leader and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.
“I’m not an anti-Semitic person. I (didn’t) even know what anti-Semitic was before I was called it. I’m a humanist. I see good in everybody. I saw something good in Hitler,” Badu said randomly as the Nazi leader had not been previously mentioned in the interview.
“Come again?” the interview asked back.
“Hitler was a wonderful painter,” she responded.
Dissatisfied with her response, the interviewer pushed Badu to explain herself, noting that, contrary to popular belief, Hitler was a relatively mediocre artist.
“Okay, he was a terrible painter. Poor thing. He had a terrible childhood. That means that when I’m looking at my daughter, Mars, I could imagine her being in someone else’s home and being treated so poorly, and what that could spawn. I see things like that. I guess it’s just the Pisces in me,” Badu answered.
Badu’s clarification only confused the interviewer further who asked if she was simply “turning the idea of empathy into an empty abstraction.”
“Maybe so,” Badu responded before admitting the obvious. “… I know I don’t have the most popular opinion sometimes.”
Later on, Badu proceeds to declare her “love” for Bill Cosby and praised “what he’s done for the world” before dismissing his sexual assault allegations because he might simply be “sick.”
“The people who got hurt, I feel so bad for them. I want them to feel better, too. But sick people do evil things; hurt people hurt people. I know I could be crucified for saying that, because I’m supposed to be on the purple team or the green team. I’m not trying to rebel against what everybody’s saying, but maybe I want to measure it. Somebody will call me and ask me to come to a march because such and such got shot. In that situation I want to know what really happened,” Badu said.