Over the course of last week, a story exploded of an influencer on Instagram and YouTube named Derrick Jaxn. Derrick has written several books and had over a million followers. He created daily videos of him critiquing relationship videos. He became a relationship guru to black women while condemning the relationship behavior of black men despite being a black man himself.
A vlogger named Tasha K exposed that Derrick Jaxn wasn’t the man he pretended to be on Instagram.
First, Derrick Jaxn suddenly revealed he was married. After years on the internet with never even a mention of a wife, he posted a wedding picture from his wedding in 2018. You would think that being a relationship guru that it would benefit your brand to show you are in a healthy marriage.
Tasha K revealed in several videos that Derrick Jaxn had several mistresses throughout the time he has been married. The women came forward revealing similar details in their relationships with Derrick. One said she had even become pregnant. Tasha K had screenshots of text messages, recordings of her conversations with the women and pictures the women took of Derrick. Each woman said he told her that he was separated and getting a divorce from his wife.
In an effort to save his brand, Derrick Jaxn went live on Instagram and tried to denounce the first woman by saying they had a sexual relationship, but didn’t have sex. It sounded eerily similar to Clinton’s defense. That didn’t work because the comments, twitter fingers and disappointed subscribers kept talking. More and more information came out.
What followed can only be described as disappointing.
Derrick posted a video with his wife, the wife no one knew existed until days earlier. They were both sitting on the couch with their hands clasped showing a united front. In the video, Derrick and his wife Da’Naia Jackson, addressed the rumors of extramarital affairs. Derrick admitted that he was unfaithful numerous times. He talked in circles, but never really explained why but interjects God into it.
He invited Da’Naia to speak and she claimed she has already forgiven him for his infidelity as if she knew for a significant amount of time. She says his redemption is between him and God. She labels herself a Godly woman and uses religion as her strength to find forgiveness. Having just become aware of her, there is no way to know if she truthfully forgives him, has been brainwashed or may be a victim of abuse.
You would think that would be the end of it, but it didn’t end there.
Derrick Jaxn then made a video of him watching his own video and critiquing himself as one of the types of men he warned women about. It still sounds bizarre as I write it. He spoke about himself in the third person and tried to praise himself for coming forward to admit his wrongdoing.
Then another video from Tasha K revealed another Mistress who was with Derrick now. She said that he was texting her after the video with his wife came out and wanting to explain the situation. She said he rode past her house and then she revealed that in the video where he is critiquing himself that he was sitting in front of her house while he made that video.
In trying to process this whole situation, I saw several things happening at once. First, the women who had been taking his advice, buying his books and believing in the possibility that there are some men who want to act in a way that affirms good relationships; those women became disillusioned and lost hope. I would imagine they felt some emotional abandonment and betrayal that they couldn’t identify this man who was using their insecurities to exploit them.
The black men who also felt exploited for gain were celebrating that Derrick Jaxn had finally been exposed as fraudulent. Many expressed that his relationship advice put pressure on relationships as women raised their expectations or that he was feeding them expectations that he couldn’t even meet.
What I saw overall was turmoil.
Derrick Jaxn was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He exploited the emotional fragility of his followers by making himself the only man who understands how to treat a woman and then mined his friend’s list for the most susceptible ones to satisfy his egoic sexual needs. I’m not a psychologist, but I would say based on the fallout that Derrick Jaxn showed Narcissistic traits. The level of manipulation of building his brand based on projecting his own behavior then providing advice as to how it should be handled is either genius or villainous.
When I learned his wife has been with him for 12 years before being married for 2 years. I felt sorry for her because not only has she been dealing with this behavior in their relationship for that long, but she had to watch him give women advice of what not to accept while she was accepting it from him. This must have eroded her self-esteem even more than the cheating alone. It’s a form of gaslighting.
I didn’t think anyone should be celebrating a man preying on vulnerable women and using their relationship hope to sleep with them while abusing their vulnerability. Unfortunately, we see this time and time again. As a woman, it’s one more failure of trust. It’s one more instance of a lack of emotional safety even in men who claim to have a woman’s best interest at heart.
In this instance, Derrick Jaxn didn’t have his fans’ safety in mind. He didn’t have his wife’s safety in mind because he was having unprotected sex with other women which could have given her STD’s. He was also meeting up with groups of people and unknown women during the Pandemic then returning home to his wife and children.
Lastly, when it came time to save his brand, he put his wife in the crosshairs of public scrutiny. She played no part in his business before now. She had nothing to do with his behavior. She was equally as deceived as the women he pursued.
She had nothing to explain to anyone, but he asked her to legitimize and validate him in public even though he had never done that for her in 12 years. He used her with no thought of how she would be viewed or treated and she is taking the criticism under the guise of being the forgiving, Christian wife.
There are so many troubling elements within the entire situation. What we can learn is that we can’t base our own integrity on any relationship around us or any relationship we see because you never know what is happening behind closed doors. There are no winners in this situation unless people learn that this type of deception does irreparable emotional damage.