R&B singer Brian McKnight lambasted his ex-wife Julie McKnight and brother Claude McKnight in an intimate and pointed Instagram post on Tuesday, June 3, for making his 32-year-old son, Niko’s, death a public affair instead of giving him time to mourn in silence.
The touching statement is McKnight’s first public acknowledgment of Niko’s recent death from cancer. This tragedy prompted an online backlash against the R&B singer over what people perceived as his silence and his absence during his son’s last days. But McKnight is adamant: The true tragedy is not only Niko’s death but how it’s been treated in the court of public opinion.
“A big big thanks to Claude McKnight’s tasteless and self-serving interception on TikTok,” he wrote, digging at his brother for a selfish play. “It has become a circus, a travesty of a life lost, which smears this tragedy in a drama reality show,” he wrote.
The singer’s post laid bare an even more profound rupture behind the scenes between father and son and among family members now publicly torn over Niko’s legacy. McKnight said he had offered support during Niko’s battle with cancer, which included access to the country’s best private health care, and that his son and his ex-wife turned down his offers.
“When he and I last spoke, we offered him all the help we can give,” McKnight said. “We had the number-one oncologist on deck … the door was open, the line of communication was open and stayed open until his death.” McKnight said, “To the self-proclaimed ‘mama bear,’ God have mercy on your soul for never allowing him to accept that help,” he wrote.
The bulk of the criticism, for McKnight, appears not to be the silence surrounding Niko’s illness so much as how Niko’s life and death have been framed in public with him in the role of the deadbeat father, a role he angrily disputes. He ended his post with a nod to faith and a defense of his conscience.
“There is so much comfort in the truth God knows the TRUTH… I have a clear conscience. The only opinion that matters is that of God.”
The backlash that McKnight is experiencing is much more than that single moment. It is years of strained relationships with his older children. In previous interviews, he has described them as “products of sin” and said excising “negativity,” even if it was said to be family members, was essential for finding peace.
Niko is said to have died in the company of his mother, brother Brian McKnight Jr., and other immediate family members, and his father was not present.
In the end, McKnight’s statement does nothing to heal the rift torn open in the family by grief. Instead, it opens a further page in a complicated, painful history that now feels unconfined by the past.
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