Cavs Iman Shumpert Backpedaled on Beef With “Empire”

Is Cleveland Cavaliers’ Iman Shumpert back peddling? According to an interview with Cleveland.com, Iman claimed he a problem with Fox’s breakout hit Empire.

On the show, there is a character named Hakeem Lyon. He is a rap artist and son of Empire CEO Lucious Lyon. His girlfriend is a pop star named Tiana who is signed to the label. Though Shump claims he and his girlfriend don’t watch the show. He allegedly said that the show based those characters looks off of him and his R&B girlfriend Teyana Taylor mainly because of the hairstyle selections – Iman and Hakeem both rock high top fades, and Tiana and Teyana both favor big curly hair.

“They’re using my girl’s character, her style, her look and she’s not getting anything for it,” Shumpert said of Teyana Taylor, a real-life R&B singer, dancer and actress who is Shumpert’s girlfriend. “They didn’t even change her name. They could have at least let my girl audition for the part instead of stealing her character completely.

“And come on man, they’re really using a guy with a flat-top like me. Come on. That’s ridiculous. They never called us. We were blindsided. We found out by our family and fans when the show aired.”

Clearly he never watched the show, because if he had, he would’ve known Tiana was also gay on the show and using Hakeem for popularity, that’s a side though. After being flamed on Thursday by the show’s fans, and claiming that the writer of the piece, Chris Haynes felt that way, not him.

He elaborated a bit more for TMZ after he deleted his Twitter comments.

“Fans of the show and friends have told us on many occasions that couple favors us but we do not all feel that our lives are being copied/ stolen.”

Shumpert continues, “I apologize to the actors on the show because they’re just being professionals and don’t deserve slander that’s not what I was trying to portray and I have to be more careful with my choice of words.”

“I do not appreciate the writer using his questions with my answers to draw quotes like I was making these elaborate answers but that’s the media. The writer took a 2-3 min convo of locker room talk after a GREAT TEAM WIN and made it look like a sit down interview and it wasn’t.”

“He twisted words to get the point that he wanted to get across. This is not that serious and though we don’t watch the show we are not against it.”