Tony Robbins Faces Backlash After Video Shows Him Dancing and Singing the N-Word

A video showing the self-proclaimed self-help guru using the n-word repeatedly and describing how he forcibly kissed a female fan after she said his techniques didn’t work has gone viral after being released by BuzzFeed News.

The video shows a much younger Robbins in the 1980s giving a presentation to a presumably all-white audience. He proceeds to tell them about a predominantly “militant Black” audience at a previous event.

When that “militant” Black audience dared to asked why Robbins only used white examples in his teachings, Robbins went on to explain that if Black people didn’t stop getting offended about the n-word and other matters of race, he would “never be free.”

“As long as someone calls you a n—-r and gets that kind of response I’ve seen right now, where you’re ready to explode, and what you’ve done is given that person absolute control of you,” he recalled saying. “You have no control in your life. You are still a slave.”

In the video, Robbins then goes on to do a bizarre dance while singing “I’m a n—-r, you’re a n—-r, be a n—-r too” and “I’m a h**ky n—-r, you’re a n—-r h**ky.”

Robbins said the “technique” worked and Black and white people in the audience were supposedly all singing and dancing and hugging each other afterward.

Since the news broke, Twitter has been abuzz with videos of other instances of Robbins’ violence.

Robbins’ lawyers released a statement that used a familiar tactic: “Any suggestion that Mr. Robbins is somehow racist or insensitive to the African-American community is absurd and false. Indeed, one of Mr. Robbins’ event partners for 25-plus years is an African-American.”

Buzzfeed News also revealed Friday that Robbins has verbally assaulted victims of rape and violence, while former staffers and fans accused him of groping audience members, exposing himself to female assistants and sexually harassing fans.

Robbins also admitted that when a female audience member said his tactics weren’t working for her:

“I went over there and I got in her face,” he said. “I was like, boom, boom, boom. There was a point where I amped her and amped her and amped her and then right at the moment I amped her I stopped and I reached out and I gave her a kiss. You know that? She didn’t know how to deal with it at all.” He said he had decided to change tack and kiss her after their heated exchange as a way to “break her pattern” of negativity. “I pushed her even further, right when I got her right at threshold — Wham! Snap in other direction. No way to deal with it.”

Robbins denied all of the allegations while also admitting that he was a “better human being than I was in my twenties and thirties.”

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