Joe Budden, Megan Thee Stallion, and Gaming as Gendered Arena

Joe Budden’s Call of Duty jab at Megan Thee Stallion did more than drift past bad taste—it showed how casually women in rap get treated as fair game.

Provocation is Joe Budden’s favorite pose. The podcast empire, the “unfiltered” taglines, years of clips built on him leaning back in a chair and tossing out opinions that land like grenades, all support the picture he likes most, as the blunt guy who tells uncomfortable truths while everyone else fakes nice. He has been described as an outspoken shock figure, the Howard Stern of hip-hop, living off the idea that honesty has to come dressed as hostility. That persona is the backdrop for the Call of Duty moment. During Megan Thee Stallion’s recent federal defamation trial, her team put on evidence that she turned down a major Call of Duty collaboration after learning she would appear in the game as a “shootable character.” Roc Nation executive Daniel Kinney testified that hearing players could gun down her avatar “triggered her” and that she “full stop said, ‘I’m not doing this,’” walking away from the money on the table.

On The Joe Budden Podcast (I don’t know why people still listen to his podcast, but whatever), the men turned that decision into a segment. In a clip that surfaced online, a cohost jokes that if she had taken the deal, gamers would have been “killing the fuck out of Meg.” Budden’s line comes right after: “I don’t even play Call of Duty, I’d have bought it off the strength.” Cut through the talk about “interpretation” and sit with the words. A woman explains that she declined to let herself be rendered as a shootable body in a shooter franchise because the idea of being aimed at, even as a skin, collides with trauma she is already carrying from being shot. He answers that this is exactly the kind of thing that would make him go out of his way to join in. The joke only works if everyone hearing it recognizes the logic: it would be fun to log in and pull the trigger on Megan.

Megan’s choice is not hypothetical. A California jury convicted that bitch-made Tory Lanez of shooting her in 2020; an appeals court just upheld that conviction. She has spent years describing the fallout as something she is still clawing her way through, from a PTSD diagnosis to intensive therapy that her team has told jurors cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Long before this trial, she was already telling the public she was “real life hurt and traumatized,” and pointing out that people were treating her pain like a running joke. When she hears “we want to drop you into a war game that lets players shoot you over and over,” she is hearing that on top of a very real history of bullets, courtrooms, and public disbelief.

That is the center of this story. Megan did what survivors are told to do: set a boundary shaped by what her life has already absorbed and say no. She declined a high-profile corporate tie-in because no amount of money outweighed the cost of watching strangers turn her body into target practice again, even if it was rendered in pixels. Her refusal is rooted in self‑preservation, not fragility.

Call of Duty is a franchise built on mechanized gunplay. That is the point of the game. It also lives in a multiplayer culture where women already report high levels of harassment, including sexual threats and gendered slurs, just for being heard on voice chat. Recent surveys of women gamers in the U.S. and U.K. found large majorities had experienced abuse and “toxic” behavior in online games, and Black women report a compounded mix of racism and sexism when they step into those lobbies. The idea of Megan appearing as a “shootable character” would have dropped her right into that environment as a moving target that players could shoot, trash-talk, clip, and share.

Budden knows all of this context. He has covered the shooting, speculated about her credibility, and built episodes out of the court case for years. In 2022, he admitted on air that he doesn’t like Megan, claimed he had seen her do “horrible things” to people he respects, and used his show to air out that dislike while the trial was still underway. After a backlash, he issued an apology for what he called “careless” comments about her mental health, but the damage was done: Megan’s trauma was one more topic he had turned into a content block.

The Call of Duty crack also lands on top of a much longer record of him being at the center of conversations about how he talks to and about women. He has been dragged for yelling about “fake women empowerment bullshit” at a woman co-host on television, sparking a wave of viewers who called the clip flat‑out misogynistic, hence State of the Culture on REVOLT with Scottie Beam and others. His podcast is regularly criticized by its own listeners as a place where contempt for women is part of the show’s flavor. And behind the mic, he has spent more than a decade dealing with domestic‑violence allegations from women he dated. Model Esther Baxter has said he beat her while she was pregnant, causing a miscarriage; Budden has publicly denied her account and called leaked photos of her injuries fabricated. Reality star Tahiry Jose has described a relationship that she says involved verbal abuse that escalated into him breaking her nose, fracturing a rib, and pushing her down a flight of stairs; Budden has also rejected those allegations, casting her as the aggressor and calling her a liar. We’ve seen that pattern before.

In a separate 2014 case, he was arrested in New York after an ex‑girlfriend accused him of pushing and choking her and stealing her phone. He faced robbery, grand larceny, and domestic‑violence charges before those criminal counts were dismissed, and he pleaded guilty to a lesser violation of disorderly conduct. This is not ancient gossip. Pieces dissecting his past allegations of domestic violence were still being written last year, from HipHopDX to now, and fans routinely bring that history up when he speaks on harm against women because he keeps getting away with unchecked behavior. When a man with that track record leans on a public persona built on provocation and says he would buy a combat game he does not care about just to be part of shooting a woman who already survived being shot, it is not some stray, edgy aside. It is the latest stop in a pattern that treats women’s bodies and pain as things he can talk over, play with, and profit from.

The audience response reflects that. People were angry but not surprised. Posts that spread the quote did not read like fans shocked that Joe Budden could say something this reckless. They read like people tired of seeing him do it again, and tired of watching Megan be the target again. Many spelled out the implication plainly: that he would have bought Call of Duty just to shoot and kill Megan Thee Stallion in the game, and that people would shrug because it is her. That shrug is its own violence. It grows out of years of watching Black women be dragged as liars or opportunists whenever they speak about harm, then mocked when they refuse to play along.

So the tension here is not between comedy and literal threat, as if the only question is whether Joe Budden wants someone to shoot Megan in real life. The tension is between a woman’s right to say no to being turned into a digital target and the ease with which a powerful man feels entitled to joke about wanting to pull the trigger anyway. That ease depends on a broader expectation that women, especially Black women, will absorb disrespect in silence. Refusing that expectation, whether in a courtroom or in a brand meeting or in the comment section, dragging a man like this for what he said, is how that expectation finally starts to crack.