Benny The Butcher has said that rap stardom and a major-label record deal hasn’t protected him from being profiled by law enforcement.
In an interview on The Breakfast Club on Friday (January 12), the Everybody Can’t Go rapper talked about being “harassed” by police, and about his issues with the feds as well.
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“I do feel like I’m being harassed [by police in Buffalo],” he told co-host Charlamagne Tha God. “I just found out I’m on the FBI watchlist back home. They raided my studio about two months ago.”
You can see Benny’s comments beginning at the eight minute mark below:
The studio incident is something Benny spoke about in an interview with BagFuel in November of last year.
“This my studio right here. This [is from] like five days ago,” he said while showing footage of armored trucks and SUVs to the show’s hosts. “We’ve been out of that studio for two and a half months. It’s crazy, right?”
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He continued: “They’re not looking for me. You don’t think them people know where I live at? Of course they do… I got a house in Buffalo. They didn’t go there… This shit is wicked.”
HipHopDX has reached out to the FBI’s Buffalo office for comment, but has not received a response as of this writing.
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On The Breakfast Club, Benny also admitted that he suspected his social media accounts were being watched by authorities.
“I’m pretty sure when I see who’s watching my [Instagram] Stories, the pages with no profile, I know that’s Agent Dan somewhere. I’m not a fool,” he said.
Benny (real name Jeremie Pennick) has been sentenced to both federal and state prison time over the years. During a federal prison stay in the mid-2000s for a probation violation, he was at one point locked up with JAY-Z’s longtime friend Emery Jones, who was serving time for a drug distribution charge.
Jones is famously referenced in Hov’s 2006 song “Do U Wanna Ride.” A separate stint behind bars for Benny came right as his cousin Westside Gunn was beginning to put together Griselda.
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The Buffalo rapper has been public about leaving the drug game behind when he began working with Griselda.
“I wasn’t doing it around a year before I got signed,” he said of being in the streets during a 2021 talk with HipHopDX. “I wasn’t doing it. I wasn’t fucking around. I was just going back and forth to the studio rapping and damn near 70 percent of my homeboys is locked up right now.”
