Bambaataa has faced numerous allegations of molesting boys.
In 2016, the Democratic party activist and former music industry executive Ronald Savage alleged that Bambaataa had repeatedly abused him in 1980, when he was 15 and Bambaataa 23. In 2024 he recanted his allegations, saying that he met Bambaataa at a club he had used a fake ID to enter.
“Bambaataa is not a paedophile and, in my eyes, he was doing something that was consensual with someone that he thought was of age,” he told AllHipHop. “I wish, back in 2016, I remembered about the fake ID.”
At the time, the allegations prompted more alleged victims to come forward, with Rolling Stone reporting that 12 men in total – not including Savage – have accused Bambaataa of sexual impropriety.
A man claiming to be a former bodyguard for Bambaataa, Shamsideen Shariyf Ali Bey, said: “I’ve walked in on stuff where I say: ‘What the fuck is going on.’ He travels with late teens. Those are the ones he takes overseas with him. When I went with him on tour in the states, I would stay in one room and he would have boys in the room with him.”
The musician denied all allegations in a 2016 interview with Fox 5 News, but left his position as the head of his Universal Zulu Nation organisation: “I never abused nobody. You know, it just sounds crazy for people to say that, to hear: ‘You abused me.’ You know all my people back then, you know the hundreds of people that been around me. If something like that happened, why you never went to none of them?”
Alongside DJ Kool Herc, Bambaataa was one of the originators of hip-hop and began throwing block parties in the South Bronx in the 1970s.