Gorilla Joe

A 55-year-old South Central pimp whose 2020 Soft White Underbelly interview is among the channel's most explicit admissions of violence against women.

Gorilla Joe appears in "Pimp interview-Gorilla Joe," a sixteen-minute Soft White Underbelly video catalogued by the channel as an "interview and portrait of Gorilla Joe, a pimp from South Central Los Angeles" and indexed by IMDb under 2020. The name itself is a trade term: a "gorilla pimp" is one who rules by force, and he embraces it, calling himself a "gorilla black pimp" who keeps it "old school."

He gives his age as 55 and says his mother raised him in a part of South Central he calls "Concrete Vietnam"; his father was absent and, by his account, hit him. He says a man named Moe schooled him in a garage and that he has pimped "from 13 to 55." He describes his record as "murdering, robbery, assault" and says he has been to prison "a whole lot."

What sets this interview apart is how plainly he describes abusing the women. He says he has ten working for him, that they hand over "every penny," and that he holds them with "the gift of gab." He then lists punishments in graphic terms: cutting a woman's nipple, pulling out pubic hair, tearing off toenails, sodomising a woman with a broomstick, and slapping so hard it feels "like getting slapped with bricks." "Love don't live here," he says. He has five children and says he has "no feelings" about whether they follow him. The archive files this as testimony, uncorroborated, and as a documented statement of the harm the trade does.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Not established; appears only as Gorilla Joe

STATUS
Living

ERA
2020 (public record); says he has pimped since about 1981

ASSOCIATED WITH
South Central Los Angeles; Figueroa corridor; Soft White Underbelly

STANDING
Persona