Experts from domestic violence charities have warned Rihanna not to become too trusting of her ex-boyfriend Chris Brown. Rita Smith of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence referred to Brown's recent posts on Twitter, in which he rudely dismissed any criticism of the fact that the Grammy Awards had chosen to honor him as they did two weeks ago. Smith is quoted in an article from NME, saying that the pop singer Rihanna should be wary of her former partner, who assaulted her in 2009, because "The response was fairly belligerent and didn't really indicate that he had changed much in the several years since the assault."
In 2009, Chris Brown physically assaulted the Barbadian artist, who was his girlfriend at the time. The assault took place at a pre-Grammys party and caused both Rihanna and Brown to cancel their scheduled appearances at the ceremony that year. This year, the Recording Academy chose to invite both to perform live at the event, albeit separately and Chris Brown received the Best R&B Album award.
Ellen Loy of the House of Ruth domestic violence charity added that the recent decision by Rihanna and Brown to collaborate on remixes of each other's tracks could have the positive effect of sparking debate amongst young people and raise consciousness of the issue of domestic violence: "My hope would be that there's a lot of schools and teen groups talking about what do you think this means, do you think this is a good thing, do you think it is a bad thing?" On Monday - Rihanna's birthday - both she and Brown had posted links on their Twitter feed to collaborative remixes. Rihanna's track 'Birthday Cake' seemed to cause the most controversy as it featured Chris singing the line "Girl I want to f*ck you right now."