Shayla Stevens, the Atlanta Falcons Cheerleader who was allegedly assaulted by Da Brat earlier this month, has hired prominent attorneys Willie Gary and CK Hoffler and their firm, Gary, Williams, Finney, Lewis, Watson and Sperando P.L., AllHipHop.com is reporting.
Gary and Hoffler’s high powered, Florida-based law firm will represent Stevens against not only Da Brat, but Jermaine Dupri’s new nightclub, Studio 72.
“Our client was physically attacked by Da Brat and has suffered significant head injuries, permanent disfigurement as well as mental distress,” Gary said. [SOURCE]
TICHINA ARNOLD AS Lena Baker
Everybody Hates Chris star Tichina Arnold will take on her first big-screen dramatic title-lead role of her acting career when she stars in the independent film, The Lena Baker Story, about the first woman in the state of Georgia sent to the electric chair.
The 44-year-old African American woman became a virtual sex slave to her white employer and killed him, claiming self-defense.
“The film is a cradle-to-grave story that offers a real perspective on Lena as opposed to just one incident,” writer-director-producer Ralph Wilcox tells the Hollywood Reporter. “Race does play a part, but this story is really about a woman torn between a rock and a hard place.”
Arnold’s role sounds hardcore and interesting
Wow! Congrats to Tichina! Da Brat…grow up
wait a minute that women SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN KILLED…WTF!!!!!
The Brat needs to be under the jail.
I’m glad Tichina is doing a role like this! As for Da Brat…….Whatever.
My bad….FIF!
thats how they did blacks back in the day…that bullcrap is still here today, prime example, “jena 6″. blacks always get the short end of the stick. but congrats to tichina, she looks really pretty in that pic.
come on brat, get it together.
still got the medusa look, come on girl.
what is going on w. black celebs today?!
GOODNESS!
go on Tichina, this movie sounds great.
Brat smacked her up cause she didn’t wanna give up the nani!! I am happy for Miss Arnold, she is still working after all these years. WTF is the other 85% of the Martin cast doing about now???
Gina is on some cops tv show that comes on lifetime I believe
Da Brat should be sitting in jail for how she did that woman. At the very least though she will definitely pay big time. I don’t understand what made her think it was okay to hit someone over the head with a glass bottle, but she needs some serious help!
Wow,,,Da Brat looks like she givin Jermaine the business! lol.
I hope all works out for her. The vic just wants some cash for her trouble, just pay her off and make it stop.
TArnold, she is a good actress. I can’t wait to see her in this. I would love to see her in a Tyler Perry production as well.
kind
Well go head Tichina!!!
i always wanted to see her play a part with depth.
she should make alot of noise with this role and i hope she does a great job.
this story is very sad and i will be watching the movie in remembrance of Lena Baker.
Congrats to Tichina. I think she’s an excellent actress and this role, will really do it big for her. As for Da Brat, damn, it’s a damn shame. Why do us black people have to be so damn ignorant and for no reason. Sometimes the wrong people get blessed with all the money and fame.
GO T.A!…..I think she is really pretty…I always thought she was the prettier than Gina on Martin….. No comment on Da Brat
I love Tichina’s hair in the picture above. She is a beautiful, black woman. The story line of the movie definately caught my attention. Sounds interesting and I can’t wait for the film!
SMH @ Da Brat. I wish she would stop wearing those baggy clothes, she looks so damn lame dressed up as if it was still 1994…lol
On the flip side she is sexy as heck when dressed like a real WOMAN!!!!!!!!
That’s a strong role to play im sure Tichina can pull it off well.
As for Da Brat – Her Name says it all, Grow up mama.
I want to and I don’t want to see this movie. I know as strong spirited as Tichina is, she is going to pull this role off. I need to read a book about her first. Stories like this are better in print FIRST for me. The movies leave so much out.
I’ve never heard of Ms. Lena Baker, but I will now! Her story sounds interesting. Is there a book out about her?
*going to do research on her*
SMH @ Da Brat
Tichina…I will definitely support that movie. She looks great in that pic.
thats great for Tichina, shes a good actress, its about time.
I read about Lena yrs ago…will b interesting to see a movie…
Go Tichina Everybody Hates Chris is the BEST show on TV.
That role sounds good I may have to check that out.
Da Brat=stupid
Da Brat needs to go to jail, and I hope that girl sues her ass for everything shes worth. Thats unnecessary to attack somebody like that…
The Tichina Arnold movie sounds really interesting. Im looking forward to seeing it!
I am sooo happy that tichina finally landed a more serious and dramatic role. this sounds as if it will be a realy good movie. I have never heard of the story of Lena Baker but I am about to google it… As for Da Brat I really wish she would act her age…enough already!!
Bout time Tichina got a serious role and left the sitcoms alone, she can act, and now she has a chance to prove that beyond her blakc audience.
Congratulations to Tichina Arnold! Glad she received a role with depth and substance.
No comment on Da Brat besides growup!!!!!!
Its ashamed she’s disfigured. She was really pretty.
This is her picture and bio
http://www.atlantafalcons.../Cheerleaders/Shayla.aspx
congrats tichina!!
i think that would really be an interesting story to see but …..what i dont understand is how can race not play a part in telling this story. this incident happened in the 1940′s when blacks obviously had little to no rights. i can see where the writer would want to show the strength of the woman in trying to overcome her circumstances but as a black woman her circumstances were clearly different.
Da Brat is screwed. Seems like Tachina can do that role justice, sounds interesting.
Well Brat, like any real woman, it’s time to face the consequences. So be it. Who cares? It ain’t like you about to go to jail. Go ahead and pay her hospital bills and whatever the judge deems appropriate. The problem is you can’t do things a regular chick with a 9-5 can do. They have alot of money hungry mofo’s in this world who will actually push your buttons when they find out which buttons to push.
Congrats to Tichina on her leading role. This sounds like it will turn out to be a very good movie. I may have to check this out.
Smh at people putting their pic with their comm.
Congrtaulations to Tichina – That’s a huge role, and a story worth telling.
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DaBrat and JD better go ahead and try to settle, Willie Gary is one of the best lawyers nationwide.
http://www.williegary.com/wgary.html
Tich has never really been in a dramatic at all, right?? She’s always been the funny agressive chick. Good to see her getting a role that, who knows, might get a win @ some award… Not that she hasn’t already but this is CLEARLY a different plateau of work for her…
Anybody else notice that it ain’t look like she hardly aged one bit since way back when?? Girl got some good genes boy and good actin’ chops to add…
dueces:)
This seems like it will be a must see…I haven’t heard too much about Ms. Lena historically so it will be very educational. Wonder who is playing the white employer/master…
Wow, that Tichina role seems very interesting.
I’m glad they are making a movie about Lena Baker. Her story reminds me of Celia vs. Missouri, a case where a salve killed her master after he repeatedly raped her, but was still sentenced to death because she was still her masters “property.” Its kinda weird how these things show up several times in history at different times…….
Wait it’s an independent film which means it will probably be in limited release. Too Bad.
Very interesting story about Lena Baker-
More details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_Baker
And there is a book – “The Lena Baker Story” author, Lela Bond Phillips.
I’ve never seen Tichina play a serious role so this ought to be interesting.
THATS BULLSHIT!!!
OBVIOUSLY SHE DID OR SAID SOMETHING FOR BRAT TO GO OFF ON HER..
I THINK THAT PEOPLE NEED TO LEAVE OUR RAP STARS AND ACTORS ALONE AND LET THEM HAVE A LIFE.
IF THEY WERE NORMAL PEOPLE AND NOT STARS,THEIR BUSINESS WOULDNT EVEN BE ALL UP IN THE AIR LIKE THAT FOR PEOPLE TO GIVE THEIR OPINION..
BECAUSE TO ME HOLLYWOOD CASES GO BY PUBLIC REACTION..
ITS NEVER INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY!!
DAMN JUST THE STORY ALONE BEHIND THE MOVIE, SADDENS ME… IM NOT SURE IF IM UP TO SEE THIS MOVIE, THE LADY’S PIC JSUT REMINDS ME OF ANYONE’S GRANNY, CAN YOU IMAGINE YOUR GRANNY BEING SENT TO THE ELECTRIC CHAIR??? SMH…
BRAT U LOOSING WAAAYYY TOO MANY COOL POINTS WITH ME…
the movie sounds good! ive loved and followed tichina ever since martin…shes a great actress and not to mention hilarious!! it should be interesting seeing her play a dramatic role…
could care less about da brat to be honest.
COOL go Tichina I have always been a fan of yours!
Lena Baker
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Lena Baker (June 8, 1901 – March 5, 1945) was an African American maid who was executed for murder by the State of Georgia in 1945 for killing her employer, Ernest Knight in 1944. At her trial she claimed that he had imprisoned and threatened to shoot her should she attempt to leave, whereupon she took his gun and shot him.
As a child Baker and her family worked for a farmer named J.A. Cox chopping cotton. They were not paid well and even working in a laundry, the family was poor.
At the age of 20, Baker and a black friend found they could make money by “entertaining gentlemen.” This came to attention of the Randolph County sheriff as their clientele were white and interracial relationships were illegal in Georgia. The two were arrested and spent several months in a workhouse. On release she was ostracized by the black community, leading her to become an alcoholic.
In 1941, Baker was hired by Knight to care for him after a fall broke his leg. In the town of Cuthbert, Georgia, Knight was viewed as brutal and abusive. He was a failed farmer who ran a gristmill. He always had a pistol strapped to his chest. A relationship developed between the two. Knight would provide Baker with alcohol in return for sex, and the whole town knew of it. Knight was persuaded by his oldest son to move to Tallahassee, Florida in an effort to break up the pair, but Baker came with him. Knight’s oldest son then gave Baker an ultimatum to leave. She did, but Knight followed her back to Cuthbert.
On the night of April 30, 1944 Lena Baker went to the house of J.A. Cox, who was now the town coroner and told him that she had shot Knight. Cox told Baker to go to the sheriff, while he would go to gristmill where Baker said Knight’s body was. Baker did not go to the sheriff, but instead went home. She was picked up by the sheriff later that night, but was cooperative. He gave her two days to sleep off the affects of the alcohol in her system.
Baker then told her version of events. Knight had come to her house drunk and asked her to come to the mill. She did not want to, but knew better than to refuse the drunk man. She tried stalling him by asking for money to go buy some whiskey. He gave her some money and she went to the tavern but found it closed. She waited there for a while hoping that Knight would leave her house. She returned but found he was still there. She was forced to accompany him to the mill, but escaped and hid in some bushes. She bought some whiskey and went to sleep at the nearby convict camp. On waking the next morning she decided to go to the mill and she was sure this was the last place that Knight would go. However this was exactly where Knight was. He held her prisoner for several hours, even though several hours of his absence. He returned and told Baker he would kill her before she would ever leave again. A struggle ensued, with Baker being the only living witness the details of what happened are sketchy at best but Baker managed to get hold of Knight’s pistol, which went off, hitting him in the head, instantly killing him.
Although Knight was not liked in the town, a white man had been killed by a black woman, something that was intolerable to the segregationist townsfolk. Lena Baker was charged with capital murder and stood trial on August 14, 1944. The all-white male jury convicted her by the end of the afternoon. Her court-appointed counsel filed an appeal but then dropped Baker as a client.
On entering the execution chamber, Baker calmly sat in the electric chair and said “I have nothing against anyone. I’m ready to meet my God.” She was buried at Mount Vernon Baptist Church.
In the 2000s, members of her family petitioned to have a pardon granted by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, seeing the original verdict as racist. This was granted in 2005, with the Parole Board suggesting a verdict of manslaughter would have been more appropriate.
The best source for information about Lena Baker is the book The Lena Baker Story. It is the primary source. All of the below listed sources are secondary.
The Pursuit of Justice
Roosevelt Curry glances down at the simple concrete marker over Lena Baker’s grave. It doesn’t tell much of a story. The inscription simply lists her name, her date of birth June 8, 1900 — and the date of her death, May 5, 1945. It’s not much of a memorial. “We want to put up a better stone so it will always be taken care of so nobody has to watch over it,” says Curry. “A better one. A marble one.”
But a tombstone isn’t a real memorial. It’s just a piece of rock, Curry knows. To truly honor the memory of his great-aunt, he says, “I wish I could get a million women up here.”
To Curry, the legacy that his great-aunt left behind is one of struggle. The sordid tale of her life in the desperate red-dirt fields and back alleys of Cuthbert, Ga., is a story of a woman fighting for her life. “This is a woman’s fight. This is a woman’s fight because the lady’s rights were violated,” he says.
The Lena Baker Story
According to court records, interviews with family members and those who have studied the case, Lena Baker’s struggle began the moment she was born into a poor family of black sharecroppers in Cuthbert. “Those were desperate times,” says Lela Bond Phillips, a professor at Andrew College in Cuthbert and the author of the book “The Lena Baker Story.” The world Lena Baker was born into was a world where women had few rights and where black women had virtually none. Their lives were arranged according to the dictates of men, white men in particular.
As a child, Lena Baker worked with her family chopping cotton for a well-to-do white farmer named Cox. Though the Cox family treated them well, the job didn’t pay enough to keep the family fed and clothed, and the occasional work Lena and her mother, Queenie Baker, did as domestics and taking in laundry from other white folks didn’t help much.
By the time she was a young woman, Lena Baker had discovered that she had one thing she could trade on, her good looks. In the mid 1920s, according to court documents that Prof. Phillips unearthed, Lena and a friend, another woman from Cuthbert, began entertaining gentlemen callers in exchange for money. Though the tiny brothel they operated scandalized the black community, little would likely have been said about it, except that it was rumored that the partners counted among their clients some of the area’s white men. While prostitution– even as a response to crushing poverty — was illegal, the white authorities in Cuthbert would likely have ignored the operation if the clientele had been exclusively black, Phillips said.
But because there were rumors of “race mixing” — an unforgivable crime in rural Georgia in the early 20th century — the Randolph County Sheriff felt compelled to act. Baker and her partner were arrested, convicted and spent several horrifying months locked up in the county’s dungeon-like workhouse.
When Lena Baker was released from the workhouse, she was, to a great extent, ostracized even by her own community. “I think the black community was embarrassed by her,” Phillips says. Though she continued to sing in the church choir on Sundays, the rest of her life was marked by loneliness, isolation, and a growing dependence on the only other solace she could find, alcohol.
Night after night, it is said, Lena Baker would make her way to a back alley near Dawson Street. Baker would find a “colored café,” as she would later call it, to suck down store-bought whiskey when she could afford, or homemade sour mash when she couldn’t. By the time she was in her forties, she was the mother of three children and, her family now admits, a full-blown alcoholic.
Perhaps, says John Cole Vodicka, the activist founder of The Prison and Jail Project, an inmate advocacy group, Project, it was Lena Baker’s vulnerability that led her to the bottle. And maybe it was the liquor that made her even more vulnerable, Vodicka suggests. In any event, Baker soon came under the sway of a gun-toting, whiskey-swilling white man named Ernest B. Knight. She often predicted he would be the death of her.
No comment on Da Brat. I can’t wait to see Tichina’s new movie, sounds interesting.
I can’t wait until this movie comes out!! Tichina is my girl!! I miss her and the Martin crew!! (tear)
hmm.. the story is weird.. she actually had a relationship with the man, which in itself was a mess.. so .. I don’t know. very interesting, though
FORGIVE ME ALL MY BLACK PPL FOR BEING SO IGNORANT ABOUT THIS STORY. BUT THIS IS MY FIRST TIME HEARING ABOUT THIS…….SHE WAS A SEX SLAVE AND WAS SENT TO THE ELECTRIC CHAIR….THIS JUST MAKES ME SO UPSET EVEN READING ABOUT IT……………BUT I WILL MOST DEFINITELY WATCH THE MOVIE WHEN IT COMES OUT. AND I HOPE IT EARNS TICHINIA ARNOLD AN OSCAR…..SHE BETTER PERFORM THE HELL OUT OF THIS CHARACTER..
@ 3 I’M WITH U ON THAT ONE……I WISH THEY WOULD TRY THAT MESS NOW….
Congrats to Tichina…I’m glad she’s really getting some recognition in Hollywood b/c she is a great actress and has remained consistent with her deliverance year after year…i would definetly like to see this movie and get more insight into the life of Lena Baker
Good for Tichina. Sounds like a real interesting role.
The Lena Baker Story sounds like it would be a great movie. Although I have never heard of this lady I am not surprised at the story…I am sure there are so many stories from our black ancestors that have not been told that we probably could not even imagine. I am sure Tachina will do a great job…………..
Da Brat….a has been. Please get a life and do something else with your self. Start with a make over
Go Tichina! Love her on EHC, it will be good to see her in a dramatic role.
As for Da Brat…hopefully that girl cleans her pockets. It’s time for her to grow up, if I remember the story right (I could be wrong) the girl walked away and she ran up on her with the bottle after an argument about the girl bumping into her??!!!
Looking at that chicks profile she hardly seems like the gangster type?? But looks are deceiving so who knows, but this is the second time Da Brat has done this shit. She needs to pay and do some time.
Also stop dressing like a teenage boy in 1995!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THAT SHIT IS NOT CUTE, YOU LOOK LIKE A DAMN FOOL.
Why are we talking about Da Brat, she hasnt made good music since Funkdafied.
Has anyone seen the profile of the girl that “Da Brat” has assaulted ?
She is so fine !!!
http://www.atlantafalcons.../Cheerleaders/Shayla.aspx
Willie Gray is no joke.
Da Brat should just settle out of court, cause Willie Gray will take her for everything she has….
I really would like to know WHAT they were arguing about, and WHY “Da Brat” hit her in the head with a rum botttle…..
Does anyone know the details ???
Could it have possibly been a lovers quarrel ?
I mean, that pretty extreme & extra to hit someone upside the head with a rum bottle…
That’s a lot of emotional & anger towards a person that she supposedly did not know…… you know what I’m saying….
Damn, congrats to Tichina…that’s a big ole’ meaty role…good for her.
Will JD tell his little sister to stop hitting bitches over the head with bottles with her butch ass.
My mom told me about Lena years ago, I look forward to watching the movie.
Tichina seems to be a good pick for the role.
I hope that girl recovers DaBrat should be ashamed of herself.
Congrats to Tichina Arnold I havn’t been to the movies in years but I will support this one.