BY
BET
Early on at the BET Awards, the cameras “caught” Rihanna playing with a roll of duct tape, leading a bunch of people to wonder on social media what exactly was going on. It turned out to be part of a clearly planned gag on the behalf of BET — later in the show came the payoff, with Rihanna duct-taping Floyd Mayweather’s mouth shut.
The “joke” seemed to poke fun at Mayweather’s and Rihanna’s well-known histories with domestic violence, Mayweather as a repeated perpetrator and Rihanna as a victim. The fact that BET chose to seat the two next to each other seemed in poor taste to many alone, and the joke led to even more justifiable outrage.
