On Monday (Nov.13), Megan Thee Stallion provided the most detailed account of the shooting incident that sidelined her earlier this summer, describing how her alleged assailant, Tory Lanez, begged her to not tell police what happened and even offered her and her friend money for their silence.
“[At this point] I’m really scared,” Megan told GQ in their Men of the Year issue, in which she’s dubbed Rapper of the Year. “Because this is like right in the middle of all the [police brutality] protesting. Police are just killing everybody for no reason, and I’m thinking, ‘I can’t believe you even think I want to take some money. Like, you just shot me.’”
Lanez allegedly fired four shots from outside of his vehicle on the night of July 12, with two bullets hitting Megan’s feet.
In the interview — which opened with Meg shedding some tears as she recalls the incident — the rapper recalled hopping into an SUV with Lanez and two others as they left a pool party in the Hollywood Hills, still wearing her bathing suit with no cover-up because she thought the night was over. And while her gut told her to get out of the car and find another way home, and she did, her phone was dead and she was standing in the middle of the road in a bikini as everyone in the vehicle encouraged her to get back in.
At the same time, an argument was brewing in the car that Megan declined to get into the specifics of. But when she tried to get out and walk away, she said, Lanez allegedly began shooting at her feet.
“Like, I never put my hands on nobody,” Megan said. “I barely even said anything to the man who shot me when I was walking away. We were literally like five minutes away from the house.”
Looking to avoid trouble and worried that she’d get arrested or end up as a victim of police brutality, Megan said she initially explained to the police that her bloody feet were a result of a cut.
A lawyer for Lanez denied to the magazine that he offered Meg and her friend money. Lanez’s attorney also specifies to Billboard: “Mr. Peterson has never offered money to any witness for their silence or for any other reason. Any reports to the contrary are false.”
Last month, Lanez was charged with felony assault and a source close to the situation told Billboard that Lanez’s team sent several emails to media outlets in October pretending to be members of Megan’s record label to “campaign press” on his behalf. After staying silent, Megan confirmed in a post in August that she’d been shot and that Lanez was her alleged assailant.
The rapper, who has spoken out recently about the strength of Black women, said that what surprised her most was the feeling she had that people expected her to project strength even though she was the alleged victim in the shooting. “Like damn. I have to be tough through all this? All the time? It was like, who really checks on us or who protected us?” she told GQ. “You just go your whole life with that mentality. And then when something actually happens to you, when you properly should have protected yourself, your first instinct was not to protect yourself, it was protecting other people.… So it was like, ‘What do I do?’ ‘What do I say?’ Like, ‘Is anybody going to believe what I’m saying?’”
