Cute, Cuddly and Quietly Rehabilitated: Shuggie the panda has a dark past
CeeLo Green is voice acting his way back from a rape accusation — one cartoon at a time.
CeeLo Green
Born Thomas DeCarlo Callaway-Burton in Atlanta, CeeLo Green is a five-time Grammy Award-winning artist, songwriter, producer, and actor best known for his 2010 song “Fuck You” — and he was also accused of rape after a woman claimed she was drugged with ecstasy during a 2012 dinner date and woke up in his bed naked.
So why in the hell was he a voice actor and contributing musical artist for Disney’s “The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder” almost a decade after the allegation?
Disney chose to overlook Green’s controversial past and made the conscious decision to move forward with Green, and so far, it has worked in both of their favor. That decision has drawn little to no attention or scrutiny from the mainstream audience.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office charged Green with one felony count of furnishing a controlled substance in October 2013 after he “allegedly slipped ecstasy to a 33-year-old female while the two were dining at a downtown Los Angeles restaurant sometime between July 13 and July 14, 2012.”
Yet, “prosecutors declined to file a charge of rape of an intoxicated person, citing insufficient evidence,” despite the woman stating, “she had no memory of the period between dining with Green at a sushi restaurant in 2012 and waking up naked in the singer’s bed.”
Green then announced his decision to leave his role on “The Voice” in February 2014 on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” He told Us Weekly:
“It easily and quickly became a job. Very, very obligating... Taxing and tiring... I still tip my hat to Adam and Blake and those guys who continuously do it, but I think I ran my course there just naturally.”
He went on to mention he and NBC parted ways “amicably.”
He returned just about a year later as an advisor for season eight and performed on the season 12 finale, both of which faced backlash from Twitter users.
On August 29, 2014, Green pleaded no contest — meaning he did not admit or deny the criminal charges but willingly accepted the punishment as if he were guilty — to the felony charge and was sentenced to three years of probation, 360 hours of community service, along with an order to attend 52 Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings.
But after pleading no contest, Green took to X, then known as Twitter, to express the following opinions about his case by tweeting, “Women who have really been raped REMEMBER!!!”, “IF someone is passed out they’re not even WITH you consciously! so WITH implies consent,” and “When someone brakes on a home there is broken glass where is your plausible proof that anyone was raped.”
He was dropped from the U.S. Navy-sponsored Freedom Live Concert in D.C. in September of that year. According to a statement posted to their Facebook page:
We seek a Department-wide culture of gender dignity and respect where sexual assault is completely eliminated and never tolerated, where sexual assault victims receive compassionate and coordinated support, and where offenders are held appropriately accountable. Unfortunately, one of the performers we signed for the JBAB Freedom Live show on 20 September recently posted comments on social media that we consider to completely inconsistent with Navy core values. Regardless of intent or context, the lack of sensitivity towards an issue that is one of the great challenges facing our Navy is unacceptable.
As a result, we have made the decision to pull CeeLo Green from the Freedom Live event on 20 September. Little Big Town, the main attraction for the event, will still perform as scheduled. We will announce as soon as possible a replacement opening act of the high quality that you expect and deserve.
Mobile Bayfest canceled Green’s appearance on Oct. 4, stating in a now-unavailable announcement that Green’s comments are “contrary to the beliefs and conscience of BayFest Music Festival.”
The Gretna Heritage Festival in Louisiana, also set in October of that year, dropped Green, who was scheduled to perform the day after Mobile Bayfest. On Facebook, the festival announced, “CeeLo Green has been removed from the #GretnaFest line-up, as he does not represent the festival’s wholesome family environment.”
“The Good Life,” Green’s reality TV show, was also canceled. In September 2014, TBS canceled the show following poor television ratings, but this coincided with public outrage over Green’s tweets and the women’s rights group Ultraviolet petitioning TBS to cancel the show.
However, almost eight years later, in February 2022, Green made his debut on “The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder” — a revival of Disney’s original animated sitcom “The Proud Family” — as Shuggie, a talking panda in the first episode of the series, “New Kids on the Block,” and became a recurring character. Despite Disney’s reputation as being the epitome of a “wholesome family environment,” it never addressed Green’s past legal issues or tweets.
Shuggie in “The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder”
Green even recorded a cover of The Brothers Johnson’s 1977 song “Strawberry Letter 23” for the series’ soundtrack, “The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder (Music from the Series),” released in 2022.
In fact, the only mention of Green’s past and his debut on “The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder” was in the Slate article, “TV’s Blackest Cartoon Loses What Made It Special” by Nadira Goffe. In the article, Goffe states:
There are dark spots in this too, however, like the premiere’s guest appearance from CeeLo Green—who had all but disappeared from the limelight after sexual assault allegations against him emerged (but were never tried in court).
Interestingly enough, in June 2022, Twitter users criticized the choice to have Green perform the national anthem at Game 2 of the Golden State Warriors versus the Boston Celtics over his past tweets on rape back in 2014 and a homophobic tweet he made back in 2011, questioning music editor Andrea Swensson’s sexuality and her critique of his performance with Rihanna in Minneapolis. Disney still did not address Green’s past actions.
Green’s appearance as Shuggie was not Green’s first role as a voice actor in a children’s TV series since pleading no contest in 2014. In 2017, Green appeared in three episodes of Cartoon Network’s animated TV series, “Teen Titans Go!” as himself as part of the four-part special, “The Day the Night Stopped Beginning to Shine and Became Dark Even Though It Was the Day.” He also recorded a cover of B.E.R.’s “The Night Begins to Shine” as part of the special and later released it on the special’s soundtrack.
CeeLo Green as himself in “Teen Titans Go!”
Cartoon Network also never addressed Green’s past actions or words despite its audience being primarily children.
In fact, earlier this year, he returned to “The Voice” as a mega mentor for the new All-Star competition. However, his recent presence still faces criticism from Reddit users.
One Reddit user commented, “Why would they put him on the show? I’m very upset and disappointed.”
Another Reddit user found out about Green’s past through the Reddit thread itself, stating:
For what it’s worth, wondering exactly this is how I learned about Ceelo’s dogshit history just now. It’s so conspicuous to promote him so heavily but then just stay silent about him doing everything except work with the female coach...
And YIKES. Tweeting about “real” victims immediately after admitting to drugging his. Fuck him. And then since then he’s flown off the handle about an entire slate of female artists at least TWICE?! So fuck NBC for shoehorning him in.
Edit: Man just finishing the episode now. NBC really air a known sexual criminal saying “art is what you can get away with”?!
(Green has made such comments publicly at least once: in an August 2020 interview with Far Out, he criticized Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, and Megan Thee Stallion over their sexually explicit lyrics, saying artists should be “each other’s accountability partners.”)
So why in the hell was he a voice actor and contributing musical artist for Disney’s “The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder” almost a decade after the allegation? Perhaps voice acting shelters him from this exact type of criticism.
Unlike Twitter and Reddit users criticizing Green’s choice to perform the national anthem or his return to “The Voice,” children don’t have the ability to think critically about or scrutinize the media they consume, making them the perfect audience for the reintroduction of problematic celebrities.
Voice acting, especially to an audience too young to remember your past and just old enough to form fond memories of you, is the key to making a comeback. Voice acting primes the public for a softer, much slower relaunch of a mainstream career, thereby sheltering controversial figures like Green from direct scrutiny.
Unlike in Green’s roles on “The Voice” or his national anthem performance, he is not front and center on a screen but is represented by a cartoon character designed to hold children's attention. He’s that cute and cuddly panda Shuggie, and not the man who was accused of sexual assault and pleaded no contest to one felony count of furnishing a controlled substance after he allegedly slipped ecstasy to a woman, or the man who went off on Twitter about it.
Green is set to voice characters in two more upcoming animated movies: “Groove Tails,” which is still in production as of June, and Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Hexed,” out this November, highlighting Green’s growing success in children’s voice acting despite his past.