The Bill Cosby jokes are rampant in Philadelphia this morning after boxer Yusaf Mack appeared on the front page of the Daily News, claiming he was dated raped...sort of.
The Muslim-born Mack is catching heat from those around him after he appeared to willingly take part in a gay porn video with two men. Mack claims that isn’t the case at all.
Yusaf, who has 10 kids and is engaged to be married to a woman, told Daily News columnist Jenice Armstrong that he remembers nothing about the night in question, only that he was hard up for some cash and accepted an offer to film porn with women in New York for $5,000.
"My whole life, I’ve been what they call a whoremonger. I love females,” Mack, 35, told me last week. “The only time I touch a man is when I’m in the ring fighting.”
He says there’s a logical explanation for what happened: Mack is convinced that he was drugged.
Yup.
He doesn’t know with what or even by whom. All he knows is that he swallowed a pill that someone gave him and washed it down with vodka. After that, his mind is a blank.
Mack is adamant that he was slipped the date rape drug, or GHB (gamma-Hydroxybutyrate), a/k/a Liquid Ecstasy or Georgia Home Boy, a colorless and tasteless so-called party drug that has been known to lower users’ inhibitions and also leave them with severe memory loss.
All he remembers is that his world started to crumble in June, after friends and family started to look at him differently.
Sometime in June – he can’t recall exactly when – Mack boarded a train to New York City and made his way to an address in the Bronx. Once inside the apartment where the filming was to take place, he noticed a number of naked women walking around.
“I think, ‘It’s about to go down.’ I needed a drink or something,” Mack told me over the phone. “They gave me a pill and a shot of vodka. I took the pill down with the vodka.”
The next thing he can recall is being on a train at 30th Street Station and someone telling him to wake up.
“I don’t remember getting on the train,” he told me.
But Mack did later notice that he had $4,500 tucked inside his pocket.
He pretty much forgot about the encounter until Oct. 16, when he was on his way to his grandmother’s Gold Coast Lounge, at 40th Street and Lancaster Avenue, and noticed people behaving strangely toward him.
“I’m wondering why everybody is walking past me and not speaking to me,” Mack told me.
One of his friends pulled him aside and told him about the video snippet, in which Mack’s doing all kinds of things that I’m not at liberty to describe in the newspaper. Mack denied that it was him.
“I don’t know what y’all are talking about,” he told people. “That ain’t me.
“I don’t remember that.”
Eventually his friends convinced him it was indeed him on the video. Mack told me he had never actually seen it. But he does remember agreeing to do porn and getting on a train to New York City.
Mack told the Philadelphia Daily News that he’s just trying to be a better father to his kids, while not worrying about all those who decide to judge him.
By Glenn Erby
