FILM / I Waited 23 years to Watch Justin Timberlake Have Sex with a Black Woman and All I Got Was These Lousy Feelings / Ofelia Brooks
Sidney Kimmel Entertainment | Apple TV+
When word spread in 2019 that Justin Timberlake was filming a movie in which his love interest would be a Black woman, I immediately scoured the internet for any information on whether there would be a sex scene. My initial search came up with nothing, though not for lack of effort. The original script did not have a sex scene between Timberlake and Alisha Wainwright, who was cast in the role. I was forced to wait until the movie, Palmer, was released in January of 2021 to find out one way or another.
My appetite was whetted when the week of the release, Timberlake stans, who apparently work in the film industry given their access to screeners, performed the Samaritan duty of describing the sex scene between Timberlake and Wainwright’s characters in detail, with timestamps, and even some blurry screenshots.
The quest to see my childhood crush all grown up and sexy, and doing grown up things like having sex, with someone who looked like me, had been constant and all-consuming.
So, on a snowy Sunday evening in January that happened to be Timberlake’s 40th birthday, I was very ready to finally be put out of my misery. I settled into a warm blanket and watched Palmer.
As far as sex scenes go, it was excellent. Not too short or too long, appropriate exposition, no extraneous talking, judicious use of kissing, no overblown music or sentiment, not gratuitous; varied use of sex positions; great acting all-around by both parties.
Unfortunately, as it sometimes goes with sex, emotions got in the way of my carnal enjoyment.
I don’t care that much that Timberlake, who is married, was caught holding hands and doing some other questionable touching of Wainwright, while on location for the movie back in November of 2019. I also don’t care that much that according to reports announcing the birth of his second son sometime in July of 2020, his wife would have been pregnant at the time of the questionable conduct.
I do care that of all the people named in Timberlake’s iOS apology—his wife, son, mother, fans—Wainwright was curiously missing.
I also care that even if it were up for debate that Wainwright was owed an apology then (and it isn’t), she is certainly owed one now. Wainwright has been mostly eliminated from the promotion for the movie, instead relegated to a few Black news outlets and solo interviews where she’s dodging questions about Timberlake so swiftly that it almost appears she was ordered to do so. This marketing strategy makes no sense. Wainwright has the most enviable role at the center of the film’s intended appeal.
We can speculate why. Someone determined it would be uncomfortable for Timberlake to have to answer questions about on-screen chemistry given Handgate. Maybe it was a protective measure for Wainwright too. Breaking up a purportedly happy family is not a good look for a budding actress.
Whatever the reason, the story of Justin Timberlake engaging in some questionable conduct in public with a Black woman, receiving none of the backlash and in fact flourishing in its aftermath, all while the Black woman is blacklisted and her career sidelined, is—at this point at 17 years old—a tale as old as time. (Explanatory comma: I am talking about Janet Jackson and the Super Bowl in 2004.)
I haven’t seen any mentions of Palmer by any Black people, critics or otherwise. I assume Timberlake is so far “Gone” to Black people (see what I did there?) that we dare not even speak his name. This is so, even when his antics affect one of our own.
I’m exasperated by past or present conversations about Timberlake’s relationship to Black people. Apparently, we cancelled him, though I continue to see nothing but Black people around him in recent times—looking at y’all Timbaland, Ant Clemons, Ty Dollar $ign, Anderson Paak, and Meek Mill.
Timberlake appears to have entered the cancellation conversation around 2016 with an unfortunate Twitter exchange with a journalist questioning Timberlake’s unintentionally ironic celebration of a speech by actor Jesse Williams, which covered, among other things, the fact that white people should not appropriate Black culture. The flames were further fanned by rapper Vic Mensa who essentially called Timberlake out, with receipts, for profiting off Black culture while remaining silent on Black political issues. By the time Timberlake returned to the Super Bowl in 2018 with a new “Southern American, It’s Like the Wild Wild West But Now” look (that’s verbatim from the promo materials), he was dead on arrival to Black folks wondering where his cornrows, bandanas, and diamond earrings had “Gone.” (I did it again!)
In all of this time, there were murmurs of #ApologizeToJanet, yet lost in the conversation was why Jackson specifically was owed an apology from Timberlake specifically and for what.
Never mind Timberlake and Jackson’s personal relationship—*NSYNC’s first major tour was opening up for Jackson; she was featured on his debut solo album; they were rumored to have had a fling; and it was his song they were singing at the 2004 Super Bowl in which he was there as Jackson’s guest. Putting that aside, Jackson represented many Black women of a certain age for whom Timberlake had always been our problematic bae.
In 2001, Timberlake went on BET’s “106 & Park” and told us that he “had a weakness for sistas” (again, verbatim). For years before and after that, Timberlake shared that his ideal woman was, depending on the year, either Janet Jackson, Halle Berry, Lauryn Hill, Sanaa Lathan, or Beyoncé. His love interests in the music videos for *NSYNC’s “Girlfriend” and his own “Like I Love You” were Black women. And even before *NSYNC, in the mid-1990s, Timberlake was on “The All New Mickey Mouse Club” singing Jodeci’s “Cry For You” to throngs of screaming girls and doing skits with Xscape.
In “I’ll Be Good For You,” a song Timberlake wrote for *NSYNC’s No Strings Attached album, he writes, “Girl I wanna be a part of your fantasy.”
Timberlake and *NSYNC, like all boy bands from the beginning of time, were selling a fantasy. But Timberlake differed significantly from other white artists or groups of his era by being equal opportunity (to be sure capitalist, but I don’t care). He was selling the fantasy to all women of all races—actually, I think the record reflects that he was selling the fantasy to Black women specifically.
In short, when we Black girls sang along to “I’ll Be Good For You, we had every reason—multiple reasons—to think we were part of the fantasy too.
The significance of this should not be dismissed. One must remember the 1990s and how segregated the nation was, down to the frivolous genre of boy bands. Black fans had New Edition, Immature, Soul For Real, and later B2K. White fans had New Kids on the Block, the Backstreet Boys, and 98 Degrees—hell they had every boy band since The Beatles. The fact that Timberlake in *NSYNC and later as a solo artist was targeting Black women fans—i.e. crossing color lines—is not unlike Barack Obama crossing the aisle in his historic and successful run for the presidency. To this teenager in 1998 anyway, the cultural significance was the same.
Timberlake made me feel seen. He made me feel like a viable romantic and later sexual option. I held my head high in the middle school conversations about who had the best chances with him. I scoffed at my blond, blue-eyed classmates. To quote Timberlake from that unfortunate Twitter exchange: Oh, you sweet soul.
I didn’t have to stan for New Edition, B2K, or the one Black member of every boy band after record execs finally caught on to Timberlake’s scheme. And let us not forget: Timberlake was the shit back then. He was attractive, a talented singer and dancer, a decent recreational basketball player, and charismatic AF. I didn’t want to set my sights elsewhere. And thanks to Timberlake, whether he was doing it to sell records or not, I didn’t have to.
This was a big deal to me, and many Black girls like me.
So to Timberlake I say: Thanks for the good time. And for the sex scene—it was everything a 35-year-old woman who was once a 13-year-old girl dreamed it would be.
And: the list of people to whom you owe public contrition is only getting longer. Wainwright is in line behind Jackson, and too many others. If you ever go on a real apology tour, just remember all those sistas you have had a weakness for since you’ve been in the public consciousness. We’ve been waiting.
To Timberlake’s cancelers who are not Black women, I say: I get it, but you don’t even go here.
The conversation around cancelling Timberlake left out the only people with the credentials to cancel him. Not just anyone from the appropriated culture should be the final arbiter of who is getting cancelled. It certainly shouldn’t be anyone with nothing to lose by doing the cancelling.
When Timberlake went astray, Black women—who were on the other end of Timberlake’s relationship to Black culture for twenty years—lost a fantasy, a rare hubris, a place in the public imagination that we were desirable too. Most recently, we lost the satisfaction we deserved from a sex scene twenty years too late.
When Black women are erased from the cancellation conversation, our loss is also erased. And we stay losing. We were Janet then and are Wainwright now: mere casualties left in Timberlake’s wake.
Ofelia Brooks works as a lawyer in the Midwest. She is a First-Generation American of Caribbean heritage. She is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. A writer all her life, including her first chapter book at age seven, she’s just recently begun submitting her creative work for publication.