Eric Benét did not hold back in a recent Instagram video criticizing Jelly Roll, whose silence about political matters backstage at the 2026 Grammys raised concerns for the R&B singer/songwriter.
In a clip posted Sunday, Benét filmed himself lying down while speaking to the camera. “We all saw the Grammys and remember that moment where that Jelly Roll motherf—er [made] his speech,” he began, referencing the country star’s religiously charged acceptance speech when he won best contemporary country album for Beautifully Broken on Feb. 1. “Powerful speech, right? Holding the bible up in his hand, talking about what the Lord has done for him.”
Benét then compared Jelly’s onstage speech to a viral moment from backstage at the Grammys, when the country star took questions from reporters. “When he was asked, ‘What about the atrocities in the world?’ All of a sudden he was, ‘I’m just a dumb ol’ redneck, I keep my political views to myself,’” Benét said in his video.
“That n—a full of sh–,” the crooner added. “Never trust a person who will speak passionately and in great detail about love, but when it’s time to speak against hate, they ain’t got sh– to say.”
Billboard has reached out to Jelly Roll’s rep for comment.
The moment Benét was referring to came shortly after Jelly won all three of the Grammys he was up for at the Recording Academy ceremony earlier in February. When asked if he “would be willing to comment about what’s happening in the country” at a time when outrage over the fatal ICE shootings of Minnesotans Renee Good and Alex Pretti was fresh, Jelly replied that “people shouldn’t care” about his opinion.
“I’m a dumb redneck,” he added at the time. “I hate to be an artist who’s that aloof, but I’m so disconnected from what’s happening. … I didn’t even know politics were f—ing real until I was in my mid-20s in jail. When you grow up in a drug addict household, you think we have common calls about what’s happening in world politics?”
That said, Jelly also claimed in the moment that he did have “a lot to say” about political issues and promised that he would be sharing with fans in the next week, but hasn’t expanded on that in the three weeks since.
On Monday (Feb. 23), Benét posted a follow-up video to respond to some of the feedback he’d gotten on the original Jelly Roll video.
“Some of the comments were like, ‘Yo, Eric, why everyone gotta be f—ing political? He said he was gonna do some research and get back on the topics he didn’t know about,’” Benét begins in the new clip. “If you claim to be a follower of Christ, how much research do you have to do to publicly say that raping, torturing and killing children is bad? How much research you gotta do to say genocide is bad? How much research you gotta do to say that if the government is trying to take away our First Amendment right of free speech on this platform or any other or being able to protest in the street, or being able to safely protest in a street without having to be worried about being murdered, then that’s bad? I think one of the reasons we are in such a jam in this country and in the world right now is because too many people are too easily manipulated by a select few who claim to be godly but are funded by the Satanic.
“Jesus gave you an open-book test on what it means to follow him: Shelter the homeless, feed the hungry, and love thy neighbor,” he concluded. “All that other sh–, does that align with those teachings? Then it’s not political. It’s you being a good Christian to speak out against that sh–.”
See Benét’s video criticizing Jelly Roll below.
