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Chris Brown was met with cold reception at the American Music Awards on Sunday (Nov. 20), despite being a no-show at the event. The musician, who won the Favorite Male R&B artist award, was audibly booed by the crowd as Kelly Rowland accepted the honor on his behalf.

As Rowland announced the nominees — which also included Brent Faiyaz, Giveon, Lucky Daye and The Weeknd — and revealed Brown as the winner, the audience booed, Deadline reports. Rowland was visibly surprised by the reaction and lightly scolded the crowd, telling them to “chill out.”

“Now Chris Brown is not here tonight so I’m accepting this award on his behalf,” she said, adding, “Excuse me… chill out,” per Deadline.

Rowland also directly addressed Brown while accepting the award, saying, “But I wanted to tell Chris, thank you so much for making great R&B music and I want to tell him thank you for being an incredible performer. I’ll take this award — bring it to you. I love you. Congratulations. And congratulations to all the nominees in this category.”

Brown was slated to perform a Michael Jackson tribute at the AMAs, which was axed after ABC executives were informed of the plans, Puck’s Matt Belloni reported in today’s “What I’m Hearing” newsletter. Brown — who dropped out of the show after his performance was canceled, teased his planned Jackson medley with rehearsal footage on Instagram Saturday (Nov. 19), where he wrote in the caption, “U SERIOUS?,” adding in the comments, “WOULDVE been the ama performance but they cancelled me for reasons unknown.”

Belloni filled in the context in his newsletter, reporting that AMA executive producers Jesse Collins and Stephen Hill had been working with Brown on the tribute performance, which reportedly included “Beat It,” a particularly insensitive choice considering Brown’s past physical abuse of then-girlfriend Rihanna, for which he was charged with felony assault.

When Belloni inquired about “the prospect of a convicted domestic abuser feting an alleged child molester on a Disney network,” as he wrote in his newsletter, ABC and Disney executives were “furious” about the plan, but were open to reworking Brown’s performance in a more “thoughtful” way, per Belloni.

“Disney wasn’t opposed to Brown performing, it was just the pairing of this artist with this material that would be potentially radioactive and thus a nonstarter,” he reports.

Brown was not willing to tweak the performance at all, and dropped out of the AMAs — although Belloni reports “producers likely would have figured out a non-Jackson workaround if Brown was game.”