In May, actor Jason Mitchell was removed from Showtime's The Chi after being accused of inappropriate behavior towards Season 1 co-star Tiffany Boone and Season 2 showrunner Ayanna Floyd. Nearly a half year later, Mitchell took to The Breakfast Club to deny the allegations. It's his first interview since his dismissal.
"To be honest I'm not 100 percent sure what the allegations themselves were," Mitchell said at the top of the interview. "But I can tell you what happened." He went on to explain a situation related to his dismissal from the film Desperados, which he was working on when it was in pre-production.
"I went out with a co-worker of mine and she got drunk," he said. "I made sure she got home and the next day it all kind of slapped me in my face, I'm not sure if her and her significant other had a situation.... I actually had a girlfriend at the time too as well, and I felt like I was doing the right thing. The next day they canceled the rehearsal, I told them my side of the story and I don't know if there was something that I missed."
His retelling of the story, which is seperate to the allegations related to Boone and Floyd of The Chi, is vague. From there he went on to talk about the situation with Boone, whom he denied engaging in any inappropriate behavior with.
"If you try her, she will get you together right then and there, you know what I mean?” he said of Boone. "She not takin’ nothin,’ at all. I encourage people to be more like that, because had me and Tiffany ever had a situation where I don’t know, she might have felt sexually harassed, I can bet my bottom dollar, she would have told me about myself in that moment."
He reiterated his claim that there was "no situation" between him and Boone, but he did claim at 9:30 that Ayanna Floyd had used the "#MeToo Movement as a really, really ugly weapon" against him.
"I might have unintentionally sort of intimidated her and I can take that L,” he said, referring to Floyd's claim that she was a "target" of Mitchell's "rage and inappropriateness" on set. "For me I can definitely take my L and say, I could have handled that better. There was a time where I could have just walked off. I didn’t have to say anything to her, I didn’t have to respond."
He said that he was let go from The Chi due to his behavior on Desperados. Mitchell said there was no hard feelings between him and The Chi creator Lena Waithe, who told The Breakfast Club earlier this year that she would've "handled the situation differently."
