Songfacts®:

• This song finds Ryan Leslie singing a kiss-off to a girl he had to let get away. "They say in love and war, all's fair. But when you break up and go out, yeah, they all stare. Obfuscating the real reason we've grown apart. You played the victim so well, Joan of Arc," he croons. The song is part of a personal experience that Leslie went through over a single week. "There's just an ability to story-tell through rap and poetry, where sometimes you don't want a note to it," said the singer. "Maybe in certain moments in life you want to sing something. But when you're upset sometimes or when you really want to get your point across, you don't want to sing to someone, you want to directly let them know what's going on and that's what the 'Joan of Arc' record is about."
• The song ends with an actual voicemail message Ryan Leslie received from NYPD police officer, Detective Luis Mortimer, asking him to come in for questioning. Leslie was allegedly repeatedly calling and knocking on the door of his ex-girlfriend, Australian supermodel Nicole Trunfio. He explained to The Boombox: "The voicemail was what inspired the record, because I was going through a pretty tumultuous situation and that was really the icing on the cake. I literally woke up and for the first time in my life was being confronted by the NYPD. I was in the studio with Ne-Yo all week and I woke up that morning, made a call and asked if I could go into the studio a couple of hours early to get something off my chest. I went in, wrote, produced, recorded and released that song the same night."
  
  Mortimer didn’t even know about the song until he received phone calls about it. He sued Leslie for an unspecified amount of damages claiming that the song and its use of his voice has violated his civil rights and negatively impacted his standing as a police officer.