‘Don’t Twist My Story’: Simi Fires Back After Old Tweets Surface During Rape Outcry.

Singer Simi pushes back as old tweets from her mother’s daycare days are weaponized against her rape awareness, stipulating the posts were innocent and her advocacy is not a performance.

Nigerian singer and songwriter Simisola Kosoko, widely known as Simi, came out swinging on Sunday after social media users circulated screenshots of tweets she posted over a decade ago—posts that critics attempted to use against her in the wake of her outspoken condemnation of rape in Nigeria. In a firm but measured statement shared on her X (formerly Twitter) page, Simi said she was not prepared to stay silent while people misrepresented her past.

“I have always spoken against rape and sexual assault, even before you knew I existed. It’s not a costume I’m wearing—it’s who I am.”

The controversy did not happen in a vacuum. It erupted after Simi lent her voice to the growing national conversation around sexual violence, sparked in part by the widely shared Mirabel TikToker case. In a post that quickly went viral, Simi stated that men should stop raping women, called for the castration of convicted rapists, and revealed that almost every woman she knows has been sexually assaulted. The comments drew applause from many—and fury from others.

Within days of Simi’s rape comments, trolls on X began digging into her archive. Among the posts widely circulated were tweets from 2012 and 2013—a period when Simi was 23 years old, not yet famous, and living with her mother while chasing her music career. One tweet from November 12, 2013, read, “I wonder if anyone’s ever used breast milk to bake cake before.” Others referenced her affectionate interactions with the young children at her mother’s daycare, including comments about wanting to hug and kiss the kids or one child’s playful attempts at closeness.

Screenshots were shared rapidly across timelines, stripped of context and reframed in the most sinister light possible. It was a coordinated effort to undercut a woman who had just asked the country to take rape seriously.

Simi addressed the situation head-on in a post on Sunday, making clear she had been alerted to the resurfaced content and would not be burying her head. “I haven’t been on Twitter today—but someone brought a few of my old tweets to my attention, and I can’t not address it,” she wrote.

She explained that in 2012, she was a young woman helping her mother run a daycare center—and that Twitter, back then, was exactly what it sounds like: a place where people tweeted whatever happened in their day. “I tweeted everything that happened in my life, as we all did at the time,” she said. “Kids can be mischievous. If a child did something I found funny, I tweeted about it. Kids are cute and lovable. I want to hug, kiss, and cuddle them. I tweet about it. Nothing I tweeted was from perversion.”

What came through in her statement was not defensiveness for its own sake—it was the frustration of someone watching a mob attempt to rewrite who she is.

“What I can’t let anyone do is twist my story to fit false narratives,” she said plainly. She also noted that at the time, she was not a public figure and had no reason to self-censor innocent observations. “I wasn’t trying to hide it, because I don’t have anything to hide,” she added.

The singer also disclosed that her team had removed some of the old posts—a decision she admitted she was not entirely comfortable with. “My team has been deleting some of my tweets because of how sensitive it is for my family. “To be honest, I did not want to,” she revealed. The admission was telling: here was a woman who would rather stand behind her words than erase them, even knowing how they had been weaponized.

Most pointedly, Simi refused to let the backlash dilute the message that started this entire conversation. She insisted that her stance on sexual violence has never been a talking point picked up for attention—it is part of who she has always been. “I have always spoken against rape and sexual assault, even before you knew I existed. It’s not a costume I’m wearing; it’s who I am,” she wrote. “I said stop raping women. I stand by it.”

Those who have followed Nigerian social media long enough will recognize what happened to Simi as a pattern—one that surfaces whenever a prominent woman speaks too loudly about the wrongs done to other women. The strategy is simple: find something, anything, from the past that can be twisted out of shape, and flood the timeline with it until the original message is buried under noise and outrage. That the tweets in question were from a 23-year-old working at a daycare and talking about children the way any fond adult might only underscores how thin the attack was.

The debate continues to rage across social media platforms, with opinion sharply divided. Many of Simi’s fans and fellow advocates have rallied behind her, calling out the bad faith of those who weaponized the old posts. Others, however, have maintained that the tweets warranted scrutiny. What is clear is that the singer has no intention of walking back her views on sexual violence—and that the attempt to silence her has, if anything, made her voice louder.