Jury Convicts Tory Lanez in Megan Thee Stallion Shooting

A jury on Fri­day found rap­per Tory Lanez guilty of all counts in the 2020 shoot­ing of Megan Thee Stal­lion out­side a par­ty in Los Angeles.

The Gram­my-win­ning rap­per accused Lanez of shoot­ing her in the leg after the two left a par­ty at Kylie Jen­ner’s 2020 home. Lanez (real name Dayster Peter­son) plead­ed not guilty to shoot­ing her and devot­ed her entire album to refut­ing Megan Thee Stal­lion’s narrative.

He was ini­tial­ly charged with assault with a semi-auto­mat­ic firearm and car­ry­ing a loaded, unreg­is­tered firearm inside a vehi­cle. Ear­li­er this month, pros­e­cu­tors added a third charge of gross neg­li­gence arson with a firearm. Lanez faces a max­i­mum sen­tence of 22 years and 8 months in prison. She could also be deport­ed to her home coun­try of Cana­da after com­plet­ing her sentence.

The jury reached a ver­dict after sev­en hours of delib­er­a­tion. Lanez was remand­ed short­ly after her sentence.

Her sen­tenc­ing hear­ing is sched­uled for Jan­u­ary 27th.

Los Ange­les Coun­ty Dis­trict Attor­ney George Gas­con praised Megan Thee Stal­lion for her “courage” in a state­ment after the verdict.

He said, “You have shown incred­i­ble courage and weak­ness to tes­ti­fy in the face of many unde­served and grotesque attacks,” he said. “You have stood up to the unfair and despi­ca­ble scruti­ny no woman should face, and you have inspired Los Ange­les Coun­ty and oth­ers across the country.”

Alex Spiro, Megan Thee Stal­lion’s attor­ney, said in a state­ment that “the jury made the right deci­sion.” She is grate­ful that there is jus­tice for Meg.”

The inci­dent began in July 2020 when the police stopped the SUV the cou­ple was rid­ing in Hol­ly­wood Hills. Megan Thee Stal­lion, whose real name is Megan Jovon Ruth Pete, said she was ini­tial­ly asked by the police why she was bleed­ing and she replied that she had cut her leg with her glass. testifies.

She was tak­en by ambu­lance to Cedars-Sinai Med­ical Cen­ter, where her doc­tors found a bul­let frag­ment in her leg that required surgery to remove it.

“She could­n’t walk for a while,” she says. “Nerve dam­age” remains. I can’t feel the side of her left leg. The soles of her feet hurt all the time, but she gets over it.”

She pub­licly announced the shoot­ing on her own Insta­gram a few weeks after her inci­dent, even­tu­al­ly iden­ti­fy­ing Lanez as her cul­prit. She then shot him with the song “Shots Fired.”

Megan Thee Stal­lion said in her tes­ti­mo­ny that Lanez offered $1 mil­lion to silence the shooting.

In an inter­view with Gayle King in April before her tri­al, Megan Thee Stal­lion explained that she ini­tial­ly lied to police out of fear of get­ting into a more dan­ger­ous situation.

“You think I’d tell the police…we black peo­ple had guns in the car?” she asked. You say, “If you tell them there’s a gun in the car, they’ll shoot you”?

Lanez refused to tes­ti­fy in her own defense. His attor­ney called wit­ness Sean Kel­ly, who lives in the area, to tes­ti­fy to the court that two women had quar­reled and woke him up the night of the shooting.

Accord­ing to Vari­ety, Kel­ly tes­ti­fied that he did see two women fight­ing, but then heard what appeared to be mul­ti­ple gun­shots from a man who was “shoot­ing all over the place.” It says.

The jury also heard a taped inter­view with Megan Thee Stal­lion’s for­mer friend Kelsey Har­ris in Sep­tem­ber, in which she detailed the alter­ca­tion between the two female rappers.

Har­ris, who was also in an SUV, tes­ti­fied in court before the record­ing was played that she did­n’t remem­ber many details of the shoot­ing, but in an inter­view with her pros­e­cu­tor, she said she was killed that night. The details were report­ed­ly clear­ly explained.

Accord­ing to Rolling Stone mag­a­zine, Har­ris said in her taped inter­view that she over­heard the two dis­cussing “art” and careers before the shoot­ing. Lanez ordered the woman out of the SUV and the first shots were fired as Megan Thee Stal­lion walked away.

Har­ris told pros­e­cu­tors, “He’s shoot­ing through the door.” “(He was) lean­ing out of his pas­sen­ger door and shooting.”