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http://www.miaminewtimes.com/music/the-real-story-of-rapper-xxxtentacion-10410980
The Real Story of South Florida Rapper XXXTentacion
The corner house on a rich but unremarkable street in Parkland, about four miles from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, belongs to a scrawny 20-year-old with a tree tattoo in the middle of his forehead. He stands about five feet six inches tall and weighs 125 pounds with shoes on. The kid bought the house in November, moved in shortly after, and made the place his own, decorating in the sparse, halfhearted way you'd expect from a teen homeowner but with occasional high-end touches, like an industry-grade recording studio on the first floor.
On the fourth day, the two separated and fell out of touch. They didn't see each other for 18 months, until he grabbed her by the throat at his Oakland Park show. After that gesture, he held her for a moment and then disappeared. They saw each other briefly during the performance and hugged, Ayala remembers. He was sweaty.
Later, Onfroy invited her and a friend to an afterparty at the North Miami home of a hard-core porn star, Bruno Dickemz, who happened to moonlight as the singer's manager. The girls agreed.
At the party, Onfroy and Ayala found themselves in a corner, catching up. Ayala was still living with her boyfriend, but their relationship had soured. On the spot, Onfroy offered to let her live with him. He said he liked her and had always pictured them together. She agreed to think about it. The next morning, she started packing.
Ayala moved into Dickemz' house with Onfroy that day and almost immediately noticed something was off. According to her deposition and an interview, two weeks after moving in, Ayala admired a childhood friend's new grills in a Snapchat video she posted. It prompted Onfroy to grab her iPhone 6S, smash it on the floor, and strike her hard in the face. He later fixed the phone, but Ayala was stunned. "I got slapped for no reason," she says, "and he kept acting like everything was cool."
Later that day, Ayala says, Onfroy hit her again. "I was really lightheaded, because the slap was so hard," she recalls. "It was one of those slaps where you hear ringing." She sat for a second in a daze. Onfroy told her to wait and then left the room. He returned holding a long-handled barbecue fork and a wire barbecue brush. "He was like, 'Which one do you want me to use?'"
Ayala was confused. "Like, use for what?" In a deposition given seven months later, she recounts to a prosecutor: "He told me to pick between the two,because he was going to put one of them up my vagina." She chose the fork. Then, Onfroy began pulling up her black-and-white striped dress. He lightly dragged the fork against the skin of her thigh. Ayala passed out.
"When I came to, I remember just thinking, I cannot let this happen to me," she says. "This, right here, cannot happen to me."
Ayala wanted to leave. But it was clear Onfroy wouldn't "be comfortable" with that, she says in the deposition. She hadn't broached the subject of leaving either because, according to the deposition, she "felt scared to be open with him." When she did talk, he'd say she sounded stupid. "I barely spoke," Ayala says.
So when Onfroy moved to Orlando in late June 2016, Ayala went with him. The depositions detail a pattern of regular, torturous abuse that summer, with daily verbal attacks and physical incidents every three or four days. According to Ayala's statement, he beat her at times, choked her, broke clothes hangers on her legs, threatened to chop off her hair or cut out her tongue, pressed knives or scissors to her face, and held her head under water in their bathroom while promising to drown her.
"His favorite thing was to just backhand my mouth," Ayala says. "That always left welts inside my lips." Onfroy would also try to guilt her with near-attempts at suicide, she says. He would fill a bathtub, dangle a microwave over the water, and threaten to let go.
Onfroy's triggers were, in some ways, predictable — usually jealousy — but also erratic. Small things could set him off: like her humming another rapper's verse or asking a friend what music he was playing.
"Once, we were all in the car, and my ex made a joke," says Talyssa Lee, who was dating one of Onfroy's producers in 2016. "[Ayala] just laughed as a reaction... When we got in the house, [Onfroy] walked into the other room and started beating on her."
Lee, who didn't know Ayala or Onfroy before the week of the car ride, noticed marks on Ayala's body within hours of meeting her. "It was very clear that [Onfroy] was avoiding her face," she says. "He was hitting her under the chin, on her back — her ribs were all bruised up."
Almost as disturbing as the overt abuse, Lee says, was the lack of response from anyone around the pair. "All the boys around him, they witnessed that shit," she says. "I can't just sit here and hear a girl screaming in the next room... her voice gurgling because she's being held underwater."
On July 14, 2016, Onfroy was arrested in Orlando for allegedly stabbing his new manager, a guy nicknamed "Table," who the singer claimed had been stealing from him. He bonded out only days later, but returned to jail in Broward County shortly after for earlier charges of armed home invasion and aggravated battery.
While Onfroy was in custody, Lee and a few other friends helped Ayala escape. Shortly thereafter, she moved to Texas, safely far from Onfroy.
But by August, the two were talking again. In September, when Onfroy was released on $50,000 bond and placed under house arrest, they decided to move in together. They found a place in Sweetwater: an apartment complex near Florida International University where three friends were living.
Soon, Onfroy learned she had been with someone else. Though they made up, the perceived transgression left Onfroy with a hysterical paranoia that she was hiding something, Ayala says.
On one occasion, he woke her in the middle of the night, took her outside where two of his friends were waiting, smashed a glass bottle, told her to tell him about the other man or he would "fuck [her] up," and beat her while the others watched, according to her deposition. On another, he threatened suicide by dangling himself from a 12th-story balcony, holding onto the railing with only his legs.
These episodes could erupt out of nothing. When Onfroy wasn't angry, Ayala says, they got along. They were trying to have a baby, and when a pregnancy test returned positive, Onfroy was happy, she says.
But the morning of October 6, 2016, while their roommates were out and Ayala was lying on Onfroy's chest, he snapped. "He's like, 'You need to tell me the truth right now or I'll kill you and this jit,'" Ayala says in her deposition, "the jit meaning child."
For the next 15 minutes, she claims, Onfroy punched, slapped, elbowed, strangled, and head-butted her with unprecedented force.
When Ayala saw herself in the mirror, she says, her temples were swollen, her eyes were leaking, and she felt as if her head were "going to pop." Around that time, she began to lose vision. She vomited. According to the deposition, Onfroy was still hitting her when their roommates walked in.
Ayala says she begged the onlookers to take her to the hospital. But Onfroy forbade it. The roommates placed tea bags on her eyes and antibiotic ointment on her cuts. Onfroy dressed her in a pink hoodie and sunglasses and drove her to North Miami, where he confiscated her phone and left her in Dickemz' back room for two days.
According to the deposition, at 2 a.m. October 8, after 30 straight hours of sleeping off her aches, Ayala left the back room for the first time, went to the kitchen, and pretended to make Onfroy something to eat. She opened the refrigerator door as far as it could go, blocking his view of the kitchen, kicked open a nearby side door, and ran out into the street.
The next morning, Sweetwater Police arrested Onfroy and later charged him with aggravated battery on a pregnant victim, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and witness tampering. He pleaded not guilty and bonded out for $10,000 but was soon detained by Broward County officials for violating his house arrest.
Weeks later, Onfroy's single "Look at Me!" which had been online for nearly a year, began to climb the charts.
