Last week, Safaree Samuels–MC, former Love & Hip-Hop star, and Nicki Minaj’s previous beau of 14 years–appeared on The Angie Martinez Show visibly shaken. When asked by Martinez if he was OK, Samuels, fighting tears, revealed that he had been robbed at gunpoint just hours earlier. “A couple hours ago … Two dudes with guns just ran up on me. Had me face down to the floor with a gun to my head. They just took everything,” he told Martinez. Later, he also wrote on social media that it had been the “scariest night of [his] life.”

Rather than being greeted with sympathy, many immediately subjected Safaree to scrutiny, questioning whether the attack was even real and, if it was, criticizing his decision to go forward with an interview so soon thereafter. Others lambasted him for dressing so flamboyantly and wearing a purported $168,000 worth of jewelry, suggesting that he was deserving of such treatment due to his flashy lifestyle. When two of his alleged robbers (Shawn Harewood and Jonathan Ricketts) were captured, Safaree was subsequently harassed for breaking the code of the streets and “snitching.”

The reaction was the latest in what has become an increasingly callous and cynical view of celebrities. In 2016, questions arose when Kim Kardashian reported that she was robbed at gunpoint and bound, while bandits stole millions of dollars of jewelry. Pundits, armchair and alike, accused Kardashian of staging the entire event for her reality show. Meanwhile, at the same time, the world was literally watching her husband Kanye West mentally break down over months, laughing his behavior away as “rants.”

Such skepticism is not without merit. In a world where it has grown increasingly more difficult to penetrate the ever widening and infinitely flowing hose of information, many celebs have upped the ante with antics designed to draw attention. The Kardashian family, in particular, has been accused of such machinations, including by those formerly in their inner circle.

The climate of hoaxes and “alternative facts” in every forum has led to an environment where it is all the more jarring when indisputable truths are revealed, and, in the case of Safaree Samuels, that is what has happened. In footage obtained by TMZ, surveillance cameras show the entire robbery unfold, and it is scary.

The footage reveals a scenario much like what Samuels described to Martinez. He is held at gunpoint and forced to lay on the ground face-first. It is not hard to imagine that in such a situation, he did not know whether he was being positioned for the robbers to escape or for him to be executed. Given the arrests and subsequent first degree robbery charges filed against the two suspects, the incident is clearly not “alleged,” but real. Really real.

The veracity of Samuels claims do not validate all of the bogus stunts that have been pulled in the past by public figures or those that are surely to follow. Perhaps, however, it will make people think twice before swinging to the other extreme and alleging fabrication before more information is revealed.