- Tory Lanez was convicted Friday in the shooting of Megan The Stallion after an argument in 2020.
- In the years since the shooting, Megan was harassed with violent and sexist comments and threats.
When Houston rapper Megan Thee Stallion took the stand last week in the Los Angeles District Attorney's successful case against Canadian rapper Tory Lanez, she was a powerful presence in a deep purple suit and red-bottom pumps, poised as one could be considering the circumstances.
But as the three-time Grammy winner began testifying, her voice almost immediately broke and her emotions began to flow. In the two years since the traumatic shooting, the 27-year-old, whose birth name is Megan Pete, has endured relentless harassment, sexist accusations, and even death threats.
Megan has inadvertently become one of the most recognizable faces in the campaign to #ProtectBlackWomen, a call all too familiar for her Black female peers who regularly experience violence compounded by more violence, one feminist scholar told Insider.
Near the start of the trial, Megan brought the jury back to the early morning hours of July 12, 2020, when the "Tina Snow" artist left a small gathering at Kylie Jenner's house with Lanez, Lanez's driver, and Megan's ex-best friend Kelsey Harris. She testified last week that in the heat of an argument about his musical abilities, Lanez shot at her feet as she was walking away from the car.
On Friday, Lanez, whose birth name is Daystar Peterson, was found guilty on all three of the charges brought on by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office in October 2020 and in December 2022: assault with a semiautomatic handgun, carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle, and discharging a firearm with gross negligence.
He denied shooting Megan and pleaded not guilty to the charges. He faces up to 22 years in prison and possible deportation to Canada, where he was born. The trial began on December 12, 2022, more than two years after the day of the shooting.
The lasting pain
—TINA SNOW (@theestallion) July 17, 2020
Megan hadn't exactly seen the worst of it during the shooting itself, which left her with gunshot wounds and dozens of bullet fragments to both of her feet that she said still bring her pain, the doctor who operated on her that day testified. Instead, in the months and years that followed, she described in a tweet feeling "real life hurt and traumatized." She testified that she suffered depression and watched her career — which had propelled even further into mainstream rap with the spring release of "Savage" — take a hit from accusing Lanez of shooting her.
"This situation has only been worse for me and it has only made him more famous," Megan testified last Tuesday. "This has messed up my whole life."
Despite posting-then-deleting pictures of her injuries online, Lanez supporters — including fellow Canadian rapper and Degrassi star Drake — have accused her of never being shot.
She's been targeted online by some disturbingly cruel Lanez supporters that say he should have killed her instead.
Megan testified about the heartbreaking result of the attacks last Tuesday.
"I don't feel like I want to be on this Earth," she said. "I wish he would have just shot and killed me if I knew I would have to go through this torture."
Textbook 'misogynoir'
The violence against Megan, and the reaction from Lanez supporters in the years that followed, has reignited a larger conversation about "misogynoir," a term coined by acclaimed feminist author Moya Bailey in 2010 defined as a specific type of misogyny, the hatred of women, that Black women experience.
"We've seen people really rallying to Tory's defense in ways that we haven't seen in the case of Megan," Bailey told Insider.
Much of the criticism of Megan is loaded with sexist undertones. During the trial, Lanez's defense lawyer George Mgdesyan painted a narrative of jealousy between Megan and Harris and accused Megan of sleeping around with multiple celebrities that Harris had been intimate with. And, indicative of the way Megan's sex life has been under a microscope over the last two years, a fan outside of the courthouse on day four of the trial had shouted at Lanez as he walked to his car: "How many times did you have sex with Megan?"
Mgdesyan did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
Blogs like NoJumper and hip hop news commentators like Milagro Gramz and DJ Akademiks have contributed to a culture of misinformation surrounding the trial by centering baseless theories and regurgitating misogynistic takes, NBC News reporters Kat Tenbarge and Char Adams reported Wednesday.
We've seen people really rallying to Tory's defense in ways that we haven't seen in the case of Megan."
NoJumper, a hip-hop podcast hosted by Adam Grandmaison with more than 1.1 million followers, erroneously tweeted that Lanez was found not guilty on all counts the day before the verdict was actually established. Other outlets and commentators followed suit — including Say Cheese, which has 513.4k Twitter followers, and Gossip of the City, which has 182.8k Twitter followers — speaking to an overeagerness to share unverified information.
NoJumper, Gramz, Gossip of the City, and Say Cheese did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comments. DJ Akademiks was not immediately reachable for comment.
Megan said during her testimony last Tuesday that "this story is not about the shooting — just about who I'm having sex with."
"The process that is happening in terms of bringing in her sexual history is very much evident of misogynoir," Bailey added. "As somebody who has survived something harmful, we are still focused on Megan's behavior and how that precipitated or should be taken into account when violence was done to her. And so this is a classic tactic to victim blame, to slut shame, and divert attention from the person who caused harm to the person who was harmed."
Layers of violence
The trial also offers a disturbing example of the violence against Black women, which occurs at rates disproportionately higher than their non-Black counterparts. Four in ten Black women have experienced intimate partner violence, and are markedly more likely to be killed by someone they know than white women, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Prosecutors last Tuesday showed Megan and the court screenshots of violent remarks people posted about her online.
"I see these tweets and Instagram posts every day," Megan testified, describing comments like "'Oh, that bitch should have got shot in the head…Too much twerk.' or 'Who care, she fucked everybody, she should have been shot.'"
"It's stunning to me that the victim of a shooting would receive this kind of reaction from anybody," Megan's attorney Alex Spiro told Insider. "You have to ask yourself if a Caucasian actress was slapped in Hollywood, the backlash that would come out for her assailant and the support that would engulf her would be nationwide. And yet here we have an African American woman who is shot, of all things, and it's not that universal level of outpour of support. And we have to ask ourselves why is that? And what does that say about our culture in our society?"
Those who believe Megan falsely accused Lanez of the shooting point to her early mischaracterization of the shooting, when she told police that she stepped on glass.
But her reasons for lying were deeply rooted in the systemic violence against the Black community, she testified.
She testified that she initially lied about the source of her wounds out of distrust of the police, adding that the incident occurred at the height of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, following the death of George Floyd.
"First of all in the Black community, in my community, it's not really acceptable to be cooperating with police officers," she said on the stand last Tuesday. "I felt if I said this man had shot me, they might shoot first and ask questions later.
"I don't feel safe in the car," she said, but "I don't feel safe with the police."
Even the most famous are ignored
One of the most disheartening products of the incident wasn't the clamor over the shooting but the silence that came after Megan accused Lanez, wrote Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah reported in 2020.
"When Black women make music, everyone listens. When we dance, the world wants to move like us," Attiah wrote. "But Megan Thee Stallion's plight is a reminder that when Black women scream for help and cry in pain and even show our gory wounds to the public, the same people who love to dance to our rhythms, rarely, if ever, come to our rescue."
Bailey told Insider that she doesn't believe the criminal justice system, or Lanez being sentenced to prison, will "actually help address the harm that he caused Megan." Rather, she says, self-transformation and Lanez admitting "his culpability" would be a step in the right direction.
Even with Lanez's conviction, the cycle of misogynoir against Megan will likely persist, as it does on a minimized scale for the non-super-star Black woman.
"If these celebrity Black women who have a lot of social clout are still dealing with misogynoir in terms of how they're treated and how people are responding to harm that has been caused to them," Bailey added, "I think we should really consider what that means for Black women who aren't famous and just how they must be coping with misogynoir in their day-to-day lives."