Chet Hanks—son of Tom, aspiring rapper, actor, and occasional host of a viral internet moment—had a big day on Tuesday. A month after he declared in an Instagram video that this summer would be “white boy summer,” he released the eponymous song and video, an anthem that, among other things, rhymes “Tatiana” with “cabana,” “Rihanna,” and “Svetlana” like it’s “Mambo No. 5.” There’s the return of the Jamaican patois accent, plus a Jamaican flag. A woman twerks on his head. And then another woman twerks on his head.
Just hours before he dropped the video, attorneys for his ex-girlfriend, Kiana Parker, held a press conference in Richmond, Texas, to discuss her civil lawsuit against him, filed this week, alleging assault and battery, and infliction of emotional distress after a few separate incidents that allegedly occurred between the end of last year and early January.
“[H]e told me he would ‘blow my brains out’ and that he ‘didn’t want to live and would blow his brains out’ as well,” she claimed in a signed affidavit, adding that after taking her nine-year-old twin daughters out of the house to stay with her mother, she returned to their home to hide his gun.
The timing is a little stunning but not entirely surprising. Did Hanks release his video as an effort to distract from the press conference, or was he forcing his party anthem out into the world regardless? His attorney, Hollywood power lawyer Marty Singer, previously filed suit against Parker in Los Angeles for assault, battery, theft, and to return the money he accuses her of stealing from Hanks to pay for rent and travel expenses. TMZ also published a video on March 31 of a confrontation between the former couple on January 8, in which she appears to lunge at him, the camera shakes, and he comes back into view with a bloodied face. Hanks claims that she attacked him with a knife, which she denies. Parker filed a police report after that day and eventually obtained a temporary restraining order.
Singer has said in a statement accompanying the video, “The day after Chet Hanks confronted Kiana Parker about stealing money from his credit card, while Ms. Parker was accompanied by a huge male carrying a gun, she viciously attacked Chet with a knife, which caused him to profusely bleed. It is all on video and the undisputed video tells the whole story. Her claims are completely false, fabricated, and fictional.
Parker’s counsel, D’Angelo Lowe and Kevin Murray, said in a statement this week, “Mr. Hanks has publicly alleged that Ms. Parker stole money by using his credit cards to run up unauthorized bills. The alleged theft occurred when rent was paid on the residence they shared, and this same payment method had been used many times before. The former couple shared two residences in California and Texas.” According to the restraining order application, those men that came with her that day were movers.
In the Tuesday press conference, Murray said they had “reached out to the Hanks family because we were concerned about Chet Hanks’s escalating erratic behavior and the fear that our client had based on his actions in the past, his threats of violence against her, [and] his actual violence against her. We did this confidentially. We did not call the media, request the media, to have knowledge of this, but it was the other side that released the video [to TMZ]. It was the other side. Chet started talking on social media, talking about ‘white boy summer, black queens.’ They’re the ones that are bringing this in the public eye.”
“We consider the claims filed by Kiana Parker to be a shakedown,” Singer said in statement. Hanks himself posted, “DONT BELIEVE THE #FAKENEWS.”
The reason any of us know the name “Chet Hanks” at all is, of course, that his father is Tom Hanks, an actor so beloved that they shot him into space, fictionally speaking, because people would want to watch him get home safely. The rap career of any son of an Oscar winner would be the stuff of TMZ posts, for sure, but the dissonance here between child and father has proved particularly enticing bait in the last few weeks.
Chet Hanks grew up in Brentwood, California, surrounded by unencumbered wealth. He told Van Lathan on his Red Pillpodcast a few years ago that he would bristle at his parents’ efforts to instill the value of a hard day’s work in him as a kid, how his dad made him wash his car so he could get $40 to go out to dinner; how they gave him a PT Cruiser hand-me-down as his first car. In his telling, Tom Hanks and Chet’s mother, Rita Wilson, tried to manufacture a middle-class existence for him within one of the wealthiest zip codes on the planet.
The elder Hanks has never commented publicly on any of his son’s brushes with controversy. But, in 2019, he told the New York Times, “My son Colin was born when I was very young. As well as my daughter [Elizabeth], but that means we have this gestalt understanding because they remember when their dad was just a guy trying to, you know, make the rent,” referring to his two children with his ex-wife Samantha Lewes. “My other kids, they were born after I had established a beachhead in every way. And so their lives were just different.”
Chet has said that he’s struggled with mental health and substance abuse issues since he was a teen. He told Lathan that his parents put him in one of those “scared straight” wilderness programs, in which “troubled” kids are taken from their beds in the night and locked down in the woods for a time of tough-love therapy. Though such programs are only beginning to draw scrutiny, as Hanks told Lathan, he came to appreciate the choice his parents made there.
From there he went to Northwestern University, where he made his ambitions in the rap-slash-pop world known on campus with a parody song called “White and Purple,” taken from Wiz Khalifa’s Pittsburgh anthem “Black and Yellow.” It went viral in 2011, thanks to Gawker, and also it surfaced that another Northwestern student rapper did a tighter collegiate riff on the Wiz song the year before. Then, as now, this self-described “black sheep” of his family drew the bemused interest of local and national media. The school’s nascent blog did a loose investigation on whether R.A.s were actually giving celebrity children special treatment, and Chet was the headline. The school paper as well as New York magazine and the Huffington Post profiled him in miniature. In such interviews, he found new and occasionally heartbreaking ways to answer questions about his father and trying to make it on his own.
“It’s like this, man—let’s say hypothetically that I came up with the cure for cancer,” he told one interviewer. “Here’s what it would say in my obituary: ‘Chet Hanks, son of Tom Hanks, came up with the cure for cancer.’”
After college Chet went to rehab and cleaned up before the birth of his daughter, with his ex-girlfriend Tiffany Miles, in 2016. He started getting more acting roles, like an arc on Empire, a supporting role on Shameless, and, most recently, the limited series Your Honor alongside Bryan Cranston. (Parker alleges the first incident took place while Hanks was working on the show.) He told Lathan, too, that the roles came in when he got sober, and he also blames his biggest controversy to date—his 2015 claim in a video he posted to Instagramthat he’s “allowed” to say the N-word—on his drug use. Now, he was full tilt in the family business, just like his parents and his brother, Colin. Music took a backseat. (Though, not entirely: he started a two-man pop-country band.)
Then, at the 2020 Golden Globes, where his father was accepting the lifetime achievement Cecil B. DeMille Award, Chet went from internet curiosity to global bafflement using a patois accent while speaking into the red carpet camera and then posting it on his own social media. Wilson deemed his moment“maybe the best laugh of the night” in a comment; much of the rest of the internet was not so sure. Soon thereafter Rita and Tom contracted the coronavirus in Australia, and their son gave an update on how they were doing (“they’re not trippin’”).
The curious case of 30-year-old Hanks was mostly in the 2020 rearview last month, when he returned to social media’s center stage with a video declaring a “white boy summer” was on the horizon. It was ridiculous on its face, to be sure—and another cringe-inducing lift from a Black performer (2019 having been Megan Thee Stallion’s “hot girl summer”). But we were getting closer to vaccination and feeling giddy on possibility. So giddy, in fact, that Tom Hanks’s rapper son Chet doing a bit about “white boy summer” felt more like recklessness and cultural privilege run amok than anything devastatingly dark. The quippy video was really just rules for white boys for the summer. He started listing the “regulations,” mainly against boat shoes, calling women “smoke shows,” and for getting “drunk and sweaty,” and close-talking at people, like in this meme. The age of COVID precaution that the Hanks’s diagnoses had helped usher in was now bookended by their forethought-flouting son. Welcome to the Roaring ’20s everyone has been predicting—they will be as dumb as you hoped and feared.
But it was, of course, not that simple. “White Boy Summer” could never be a light, stupid thing one allows to wash over one’s brain on the way to their vaccinated reward. Hanks is now posting about it through domestic violence allegations. And the video for “White Boy Summer” has arrived a few days after police in Minnesota shot and killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright Jr. This week, as Black Lives Matter protests swell once again, Chet Hanks raps, “Hot boy, white boy summer/ Got your favorite Instagram bitch DM’ing her number.” Chet Hanks, born of so many privileges, has the option to post through it. Though, credit where it’s due: he’s at least acknowledged the world at large.
