Up until a couple of days ago, Jerry Foxhoven was the director of the Iowa Department of Human Services. He’d been in the role for two years, and on June 14th, he sent an email to 4,300 of the agency’s employees, imploring them to listen to Tupac all weekend in honour of the rapper’s birthday.
Apparently, Foxhoven sent employees emails about Tupac kind of… a lot. The Associated Press was able to get their hands on 350 pages of emails to and from Foxhoven that feature the words “Tupac” or “2Pac”, some of which include lyrics and a commemoration of the late rapper’s death in 1996.
As Pitchfork reports, the government official also threw weekly “Tupac Friday” events, which basically amounted to him playing Tupac in his office.
So, yeah, you could say he was something of a Tupac fan.
Anyway, on June 17th, Foxhoven was forced to resign from the position at the request of Iowa governor Kim Reynolds. It doesn’t seem apparent whether the Tupac emails actually had anything to do with it, and spokesperson Pat Garrett told the Associated Press that “a lot of factors” contributed to the resignation of Foxhoven, and Jerry himself said he believes Reynolds made her choice prior to him sending out the email, telling the New York Times that the whole thing is likely a “coincidence”.
Either way, no one on this whole damn earth can deny that some guy emailed over 4,000 people about Tupac and was then forced to resign.
