Who is Tory Lanez, prison-bound assailant of rap star Megan Thee Stallion?
Rapper and singer Tory Lanez was sentenced on Tuesday to serve 10 years in prison for shooting hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion in July 2020.
Lanez, 31, was convicted in December 2022 on all charges related to the shooting of Megan Thee Stallion: assault with a semiautomatic firearm, carrying an unregistered firearm and discharging a firearm with gross negligence. Prosecutors sought a 13-year prison sentence for Lanez, saying he’d “waged a campaign to humiliate and re-traumatize the victim.”
Megan Thee Stallion (born Megan Pete) echoed the prosecution’s belief that Lanez should be sentenced as harshly as possible, writing to the judge that she “simply could not bring [herself] to be in a room with Tory again” but that her absence should not be seen as indifference.
During sentencing hearings, more than 70 people submitted letters of recommendation asking the judge to show leniency for the Toronto rapper, including Iggy Azalea, who later tweeted, “I am not in support of throwing away ANY ones life if we can give reasonable punishments that are rehabilitative instead. I support prison reform. Period.”
Lanez was born Daystar Peterson on July 27, 1992, in Brampton, Ontario. He was sent to live in Queens, N.Y., as a child, but later returned to Toronto at the age of 15, where he lived with his grandmother and worked on his music.
After signing to Interscope, he released his ambitious debut “I Told You” in 2016, which peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard 200. The narrative-driven, skit-heavy album features Lanez both singing and rapping his life story, narrating his fight to get his music dreams off the ground and crooning slow bedroom jams, most notably on the album’s breakout hit “Say It.”
Lanez’s icy, melodic sound drew comparison to Drake, who dissed his younger counterpart that same year on “Summer Sixteen,” rapping, “All you boys in the new Toronto wanna be me a little.” (Lanez had dropped his mixtape “The New Toronto” in 2015.) The two traded subtle jabs back and forth for about a year, with Lanez at one point bragging that “Summer Sixteen” helped spike his own merchandise sales.
“When the record came out, I turned s— into sugar,” he told Forbes in 2016. “Everybody looked at it as a negative, but I looked at it as a positive.”
Lanez’s long-running mixtape series “Chixtapes,” which found him reworking R&B hits such as Drake’s “Controlla” and Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine,” culminated in 2019 with “Chixtapes 5.” Here, not only were the samples officially cleared, but Lanez tapped the original songmakers to help redo their own songs, including T-Pain on “Jerry Sprunger” and Snoop Dogg on “Beauty in the Benz.”
The album peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, the highest charting of his seven albums. Most recently, he released “Sorry For What” in September 2022, which peaked at No. 10.
Our Times music reporters discuss the guilty verdict from today’s Tory Lanez trial and the sad spectacle of misogyny against Black women that surrounded it.
Lanez and Megan were first spotted together in March 2020, when the Houston rapper made a cameo on his quickly growing Quarantine Radio series hosted on Instagram Live. In April, they went live again, this time together from the same location as they took tequila shots while Megan attempted to teach him a dance.
In July 2020, however, their relationship turned violent after a late-night party at Kylie Jenner’s Hollywood Hills home.
Prosecutors alleged that after leaving Jenner’s house, the pair was riding in an SUV with a woman named Kelsey Harris — a longtime friend of Megan Thee Stallion’s from whom she is now estranged — and Lanez’s bodyguard.
Prosecutors said the two artists got into a heated dispute when Megan Thee Stallion derided Lanez’s rap skills. At some point, she demanded to be let out of the car, at which time Lanez allegedly repeatedly fired at her, authorities said.
The gunshots prompted a slew of 911 calls, and Los Angeles police officers eventually pulled over the SUV near Hollywood Boulevard and found Megan Thee Stallion with a foot injury. Initially, she told police that she was hurt by stepping on broken glass at Jenner’s party.
Weeks later, however, she accused Lanez in an Instagram Live video of shooting her. She had said she hesitated to report the incident to Los Angeles police out of fear police would respond with deadly force as they had in the killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky.
Times staffers James Queally and Jonah Valdez contributed to this report.
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