Megan Thee Stallion finally ready to talk about Tory Lanez allegedly shot him in 2020.
The 27-year-old Grammy-winning rapper sat down with CBS’ King Gayle for his first television interview about the incident. In the interview, which aired Monday on “CBS Mornings,” Megan Thee Stallion (real name: Megan Pete) shared a tearful recollection of what happened.
Lanez, whose legal name is Daystar Peterson, was accused in 2020 of shooting Megan Thee Stallion in the feet outside a party in the Hollywood Hills in July. The felony assault case is ongoing, and he was briefly jailed earlier this month after a judge said he had violated a protective order.
The incident began as an “argument because I was ready to go and everyone else wasn’t ready to go,” Megan Thee Stallion told King. “But that’s just like the normal stuff of friends. We worry about silly things all the time.”
Speaking through tears, he said: “But I never put my hands on anybody, I never raised my voice too loud. This was one of those moments where it was like, he shouldn’t have gone so crazy.”
Previous story:Tory Lanez handcuffed in court for violating order of protection in Megan Thee Stallion assault case
The rapper said she got out of the car and “everything (happened) so fast”: she suddenly heard a man yell “dance,” followed by a swear word directed at her.
“And then he started shooting. And I was like, ‘Oh my God,'” she recalled. “He fired a couple of times. I was so scared… I didn’t even want to move. I didn’t want to move too fast. I was like, ‘Oh my God, if I make one wrong step,’ I don’t know if something that’s very important can shoot me. I don’t know if she could shoot me and kill me.”
King asked Megan Thee Stallion if she was “fearing for her life at the time”.
“I was really scared, because I’ve never been shot before,” she replied, her throat tight.
Megan Thee Stallion said that Lanez offered her money in exchange for her silence afterwards. But police had already arrived on the scene, “lots of them” including helicopters, and the rapper’s first thought was “we’re about to die.”
“The george floyd incident it just happened and the police are very willing to ‘shoot first, ask questions later,'” he said. “I got shot and they’re about to kill someone. Something bad is about to happen.”
When police arrived at the scene, all passengers were ordered out of the car. Footage first obtained by TMZ shows Megan Thee Stallion backing away with her hands up, limping as she bloodied her foot.
“I don’t remember everything (the police) told me, but I do remember being asked ‘what happened to you?’ And I didn’t want any of us to be killed or any of us to be shot, so I just said I stepped on glass.”
That comment has since been used by those on Lanez’s side as evidence that her story doesn’t add up.
“For some reason, he was just trying to protect us all,” he said. “I didn’t want to be killed by (the police). Even though this person just did this to me, my first reaction was to try to save us. I didn’t want to see anyone die, so I said I only stepped on glass. So when I see people try to use that against me, to say that I was lying… I was lying to protect us all. Sometimes I wish I had never said that.”
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After months of speculation and publicity surrounding the incident, Lanez was charged in October 2020. Los Angeles police initially reported the incident as only shots fired, a woman with foot injuries, and a man arrested on an allegation of weapons.
But Megan Thee Stallion revealed a few days later that her foot injuries came from gunshots, and more than a month after the incident, she said in an Instagram video that it was Lanez who shot them. She slowly revealed more through social media in the weeks that followed.
“The way people have publicly questioned and debated whether I played a role in my own violent assault shows that my fears about discussing what happened were, unfortunately, justified,” he wrote in a statement. opinion piece for The New York Times.
The day after he was charged, Lanez tweeted “the truth will come out” and “a charge is not a conviction.”
Lanez will next be in court for a hearing in June before trial scheduled for September. If he is convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of approximately 23 years.
Contributions: Edward Segarra, USA TODAY; The Associated Press
Reference-www.usatoday.com