On August 25, Big Freedia will be sentenced in federal court, facing up to 10 years in prison and a quarter-million-dollar fine. In March, the New Orleans rapper and bounce music icon pled guilty to theft of government funds, admitting that for about four years, she’d received housing assistance payments that her income was too high to entitle her to. Compounding the situation, in early July, Freedia was ordered to live in a halfway house after failing several court-ordered drug tests, breaking the conditions of her bond by testing positive for marijuana and methamphetamine.
Big Freedia’s crime threatens to derail what’s been a long and seemingly improbable rise, out of New Orleans’ tough Uptown Third Ward neighborhood and onto the international stage. Before Hurricane Katrina, Freedia—a onetime gospel choir director, teenage Burger King employee, and backup dancer for transgender rapper Katey Red—had already started to establish a reputation, rapping at neighborhood clubs and block parties. In the months and years following Katrina, a relentless gigging schedule rocketed her to a new level of local prominence in a community of people who, their lives upended in the aftermath of the floods, were hungry for the familiar sounds of the city—a city that had long defined itself by music and dancing. Freedia traveled regularly back and forth to Houston, a six-hour drive, to perform for the huge community of displaced New Orleanians there. Back home, toting a wireless mic in her handbag, she hopped from show to show, sometimes playing three or four sets a night at different venues. “Five nights a week,” Freedia wrote in the 2015 memoir God Save The Queen Diva, “meant there were two more nights to fill.”
The rapper had survived her own harrowing Katrina experience. After a huge tree crashed into her family’s Eighth Ward house, they’d waded through floodwaters until a neighbor with a rowboat took them to the high ground. Freedia spent three days in the August swelter camped out on a highway overpass with her sister and baby niece, among hundreds of others. They spent another night sleeping in the street outside the New Orleans Convention Center, waiting to be evacuated to safety.
Ten and a half years later, the constant hustle had paid off. A long way from that bridge, Freedia had toured extensively in Europe and Australia, was the subject of an extensive New York Times Magazine feature, and had established a Guinness World Record for the unusual feat of mass twerking assembly. She’d also brought national attention to bounce music, a steadfastly hyper-local sound since its inception in the early ’90s, and reignited interest in it among the more traditionalist guardians of New Orleans culture, like the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the venerable community radio station WWOZ. The years of ascent were also marred by tragedy—Freedia lost a boyfriend to gun violence, and her mother, Vera Ross, to cancer.
Not for nothing, Big Freedia—who identifies as a gay man, but does not prefer a particular gender pronoun—also did a lot to promote acceptance and visibility, in New Orleans and in the South, for LGBT performers. Her reality show, “Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce,” won a GLAAD Media Award. And in February 2016, as the Carnival season came to a close, another prize: Fans watching Beyoncé’s explosive surprise video “Formation,” which was steeped in New Orleans imagery, heard Big Freedia’s unmistakable throaty growl on the track, right in the middle.
Behind the scenes, in Freedia’s camp, the celebration was tainted by worry. In December, agents from the Department of Housing and Urban Development had knocked on her door to inform the rapper that she’d been under investigation. (According to a friend of Freedia’s, she showed the agents in and offered coffee.) On Tuesday, March 1st, Freedia was charged in federal court with felony theft of government funds. Two weeks later, Freedia returned to court to plead guilty.
The Housing Choice Voucher Program, or Section 8, subsidizes renters in need by paying a portion of fair-market rent to a private landlord. The income cap for eligibility and the amount of the subsidy varies based on the recipient’s income and the size of the household. Between the beginning of 2010 and the end of 2014, when Big Freedia received about $600 per month from the Housing Authority of New Orleans (for a grand total around $35,000), the rapper should not have been earning more than $21,700 per year. According to court documents, a team of HUD and HANO investigators, as well as a forensic accountant, proved that this had not been the case.
$35,000 is a lot of money, difficult to see as entirely an oversight. But some with knowledge of the program, from inside and out, say it can be a byzantine challenge to navigate. And the stakes are high, both for New Orleans residents facing diminished availability of subsidized housing, as well as rent and home prices that have risen much faster than wages since Katrina—and, arguably, for the city’s tourism, which leans heavily on musicians who carry the torch for New Orleans’ storied cultural heritage.
It’s very unusual to see a case of housing voucher theft make it to actual prosecution, said Laura Tuggle, the executive director of Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, Louisiana’s largest civil legal aid organization and the longtime leader of its housing-related efforts. In Freedia’s case, Tuggle said, the money—$35,000—was “many times above the amount we usually see.” If suspected theft is greater than about $5000, she said, the policy is to report it to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
In a statement to press sent out the day she was charged (March 1), Big Freedia called her receipt of the vouchers “an oversight—but one I take full responsibility for.” The language didn’t sit well with U.S. District Judge Lance Africk, who told Freedia in court later, “This crime is much more than an oversight. You understand that, don’t you?”
The income of public housing and Section 8 residents is tracked by a web-based system called EIV (Enterprise Income Verification), which shares data between the IRS, the Social Security Administration, state workforce agencies (which handle unemployment benefits), and “basically any kind of government benefit or income that can be tracked,” said Tuggle. It can take a year or two, even three, she said, for the system to throw up a red flag about income. (The other common way that HANO learns about potential fraud, she said, is that “a friend, or a former friend, will call the tip line and rat you out.”)
People who get Section 8 benefits have to certify their income annually with HANO to prove they’re still eligible for the help. They’re also required to report any significant changes in income within 10 days and, ideally, the EIV corroborates self-reports. It’s a system that seems best designed for workers with predictable earnings, from a salaried or otherwise regular position—not a person who works in the increasingly common gig economy. Some wiggle room is provided for workers like teachers, who can estimate a total yearly income based on a seasonal job. But if income is consistently freelance or erratic—gigs or side hustles like doing hair, yardwork, performing, or even service-industry jobs where hours fluctuate—it’s challenging to estimate and report. “Self-employment is always the trickiest,” Tuggle said.
Cashauna Hill, the executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Center, cautioned that she couldn’t speak directly to the rapper’s case. But “especially for a cash-based economy, the requirement to predict income is incredibly difficult,” she said. “Performers don’t have that kind of set, consistent clear structure.”
The state of public and subsidized housing has been an especially complex work in progress in New Orleans since Katrina. Most of the city’s public-housing developments, big brick apartment buildings that went up in the middle of the 20th century, were torn down after the storm and rebuilt as mixed-income clusters of smaller houses—a strategy in keeping with national trends. But the changed footprint resulted in a net loss of rentable units. In August 2015, 10 years after Katrina, the New Orleans Times-Picayunereported that HANO made up for the shortfall by shifting more residents in need to the voucher program. At the time of the storm, 64 percent of the 14,129 New Orleans families receiving housing assistance were getting Section 8 vouchers. In 2014, according to that report, the total number of families getting help had grown to 19,175, with 91 percent in the voucher program.
Beyond the unprecedented challenge raised by the aftermath of Katrina, HANO itself was roiled with problems. In 2002, rampant mismanagement had led HUD to place it under federal oversight, where it stayed until 2014—the longest federal administrative receivership for a public housing authority ever. Even under HUD control, HANO was plagued by scandal, including a former director who was jailed for illegally paying his own rent with a voucher and two employees who managed to embezzle more than $650,000 from the agency.
In February of 2016, HANO opened its Section 8 waiting list for the first time in seven years. According to its website, more than 20,000 families are currently on the list; the demand for vouchers far outstrips the supply. Losing a voucher, and thus leaving the system, puts you back at square one. There are provisions for temporary flushes of fortune, said Tuggle. “If you’re doing well at a particular moment in time,” she said, “if your income gets to the point where the housing assistance payment gets down to zero, you can stay for six months beyond that because they don’t want to pull the rug out from under you, if it’s an anomaly.”
The time period stipulated in the charge against Freedia, 2010 to 2014, lines up closely with her accelerated career momentum. That was when she signed to Windish, a top booking agency, and played Bonnaroo and SXSW for the first time; she toured in Europe and Australia, recorded with RuPaul, and landed the show on Fuse. Things were changing fast.
In her statement, Freedia wrote that for years, she had in fact been eligible for subsidized housing. “I quickly found myself in a new economic structure and, frankly, knew little about how to handle my money,” she wrote. “It wasn’t until recently (after I had stopped receiving housing vouchers) that it became very clear I had received assistance to which I wasn’t entitled.”
The entertainment industry is one of few that offers the opportunity to climb dramatically upward in economic class, and quickly. Unlike professional sports, probably the closest analogue, though, there’s little infrastructure in place to guide a newly-minted star through unfamiliar financial territory. The history of the music business is full of artists whose talent took them out of poverty, only to flounder in the face of things like bad contracts or newly complex tax issues.
The nonprofit New Orleans Musicians’ Hurricane Relief Fund formed immediately following Hurricane Katrina to raise and distribute emergency cash aid to those in need among musicians, Mardi Gras Indians, and members of Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, which host second line parades. Responding to the community’s changing needs, it reinvented itself as Sweet Home New Orleans a few years later, to focus more directly on housing. Street-level musicians and other culture bearers were essential to the city’s cultural economy; such artists, though, mostly African-American and not well off, were likely to be among those hardest hit by the aftermath of the floods.
“We’re a city that’s known for culture,” Hill said. “And the folks who work every day to support that culture, musicians, artists and the service economy, these folks make up a huge percentage of the voucher-based economy.”
SHNO dissolved in 2013 due to lack of funding, but its former executive director, Sue Mobley, said that at the time, she was exploring programming that would address basic financial literacy and business best practices for local musicians.
“The focus was on the entertainment law end,” she wrote in an email, “reading contracts, getting copyrights and PRO registrations straightened out, etc. We were looking for a partner to do more basic financial literacy, because clearly the need was there based on our surveys and on common sense. That said, I’m not sure anyone is actually equipped to manage the negotiation of when-do-you-give-up-benefits, because it’s a really fuzzy area. It’s so hard to qualify for many of the remaining social safety net programs that once you’ve jumped through those hoops, it can be deeply treacherous to give them up and risk not getting them again if you need them.”
Caity Bower, a Section 8 landlord in New Orleans, said that the taxed Section 8 system, “was one of the most disorganized bureaucratic processes, with some of the most confusing paperwork. It took about two weeks to even find out how to become a landlord. I can only imagine how arduous and complicated it is for someone trying to receive benefits—it’s very difficult to get any answers.”
After helping tenants in her four Section 8 apartments through the process, Bower said, “I could also attest that to someone with variable monthly income, it would be really easy for there to be miscommunication about the amount of money made. Some of the terminology that was used, I didn’t even understand what it said.”
Mobley also suggested that little practical guidance exists for navigating the benefits system. “There’s also no one within those systems who you can trust to advise you honestly,” she said. One former benefits recipient, who asked not to be named, said that at least one caseworker had advised her to report income numbers that fell under the cap, whether they were accurate or not.
The clear extensive need for subsidized and affordable housing in New Orleans by families who really are living in poverty makes it clear that fraudulently accepting assistance is extremely serious. In her statement, Freedia wrote: “Housing vouchers are a vital lifeline for many people I know in New Orleans and around the country, including struggling artists. I truly believe there needs to be more programs for artists and musicians to teach basic financial literacy and planning. Coming from where I came from, I know that I could have used that kind of assistance.”
“We’ve done analysis of the voucher program and how it’s administered,” said Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Center’s Cashauna Hill. “We think we’ve identified ways to generate savings for more voucher holders to be served, rather than going after criminal charges for those who mistakenly thought they were entitled.”
A pre-trial diversion program proposed by Freedia’s attorneys included community service working with tax preparation programs for low-income citizens and LGBT youth advocacy, capitalizing on the star’s draw, but was rejected. And some have wondered whether, in fact, her notoriety has been a negative factor. During the July 6th hearing that addressed Freedia’s positive drug tests, the judge told her, “I don’t know if you think there’s a separate rule for Big Freedia, because you’re an entertainer, but let me assure you that there’s not.” Yet—somewhat unusually—press releases from the U.S. Attorney’s Office announcing the charge and the plea used the entertainer’s stage name in their headlines, not her legal name.
In a March op-ed, The Atlantic’s CityLab pointed out that jail time remains on the table for Freedia, yet when former New Orleans police officer Tracie Medus was convicted late last year on the same charge, theft of government funds, she received three years’ probation, including a year of home confinement. Medus had admitted to defrauding the Small Rental Property Program, which offered assistance to low-income citizens displaced by Katrina, of more than $150,000. Medus is a white woman, and Big Freedia is a black man in a state that still has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with a disproportionately black prison population. As CityLab’s Brentin Mock wrote: “Whatever message that imprisoning [Big Freedia] would send to potential fraudsters would get drowned out by the louder message that not even one of New Orleans’ brightest stars was able to escape the cold clenches of Louisiana’s incarceration regime.”
There’s no question that Big Freedia broke the law—and more than once, counting the drug-test violations. But like Laura Tuggle, Cashauna Hill can remember few, if any, cases of voucher theft that have resulted in jail time. “It’s just not something we’ve seen happen on a regular basis,” she said. “And there’s room to think about whether this is the best response for folks stuck in this kind of situation.”