Reality television built one of its most profitable recent corners almost entirely on Black talent, Black audiences, and — increasingly — Black ownership. Zeus Network, founded by Lemuel Plummer, became a genuine business success story inside an industry that has historically kept Black creators on the outside of the money: a platform built by and largely for a Black audience, generating real revenue, launching real careers. That’s worth stating plainly before getting to the hard part, because the hard part doesn’t erase the first part, and neither should erase the other.
The hard part: Jadynn Brown, a “Baddies” franchise alum, has filed allegations against Plummer involving sexual coercion tied to her career on the platform. Plummer has denied the claims. I’m not going to adjudicate a legal matter in a column, and neither should you — allegations are allegations until a process, whatever form it takes, runs its course. What I can talk about, and what deserves attention regardless of how this specific case resolves, is the structural question sitting underneath it: who is actually responsible for cast welfare on reality platforms, and does that responsibility get taken more or less seriously when the platform is Black-owned?
That second question makes people uncomfortable, and I understand why. There’s a real and justified instinct in Black media commentary to protect institutions that finally broke through — to worry that scrutiny of a Black-owned platform gets weaponized differently than scrutiny of a white-owned one, used as ammunition against Black ownership itself rather than against the specific conduct in question. That instinct isn’t paranoid. It’s grounded in a long history of Black-led institutions being held to a different standard, or dismantled entirely, the moment they stumble in ways white-led institutions stumble routinely without existential consequence.
But protecting the instinct too hard becomes its own trap. If accountability gets softened specifically because ownership is Black, that’s not solidarity — it’s a different kind of harm, one that lands on the cast members, disproportionately Black women, who have the least structural power on any of these sets regardless of who signs the checks. Duty of care isn’t a white-institution concept that doesn’t apply here. It’s a basic employment and production-safety standard that should apply with exactly the same weight whether the logo on the contract is Zeus, Bravo, or MTV.
Reality TV as a genre has a documented, decades-long pattern of thin protections for cast members relative to scripted productions — inconsistent HR structures, contracts written by production companies with far more legal resources than the talent signing them, non-disparagement clauses that can chill exactly the kind of complaint at issue here, and a power dynamic where a producer or executive controls a cast member’s entire career trajectory in a way that has no real parallel in unionized scripted work. None of that is unique to Zeus. It’s an industry-wide structural weakness that Black-owned platforms inherited along with everything else when they entered the genre, rather than something they invented.
That framing matters because the solution isn’t “don’t trust Black-owned platforms.” The solution is building the same accountability infrastructure into Black-owned platforms that any responsible production company should have, and holding them to it exactly as rigorously as any other — which, done right, is itself a form of respect rather than an attack. Independent HR reporting channels that don’t run through the executive named in a complaint. Standard industry practices around intimacy coordinators and on-set advocates that scripted productions increasingly use as a baseline. Contract terms reviewed by talent’s own independent counsel rather than counsel supplied by the production. Clear, publicly stated policies on how allegations against leadership get handled, including recusal, so cast members aren’t left wondering whether a complaint against the CEO gets investigated by people who report to that CEO.
There’s a version of this story that becomes purely about tearing down what Zeus Network represents, and I’d push back on that version as hard as I’d push back on excusing the allegations because the platform is Black-owned. Zeus built something real — a lane where Black creators, particularly Black women in reality TV, found visibility and revenue that traditional networks were slow to offer them. Losing that lane over one executive’s alleged conduct, without first insisting on the structural fixes that would let the platform survive and improve, would hand a win to exactly the kind of gatekeeping this platform was built to route around.
So hold both things at once, because both are true. The allegations deserve a real process, not a shrug and not a pile-on. And the industry-wide absence of duty-of-care infrastructure in reality TV — Black-owned or otherwise — deserves fixing regardless of how any single case resolves, because the next cast member walking onto a Zeus set, or a Bravo set, or any set, shouldn’t have to hope the person with power over her career happens to be someone with integrity. She should have a structure that doesn’t depend on hoping.
— Marcus Hart