Megan Thee Stallion has shared a new allegation from the night Tory Lanez allegedly shot her in the feet: In a GQ profile, the rapper said Lanez tried to pay her to keep quiet.
This summer Megan Thee Stallion was shot in both feet after a pool party—a crime for which Lanez has been charged with felony assault. (His arraignment is set for this week.) Megan told GQ that instinct had told her to find another ride home that night as an argument began to stir in the SUV she shared with Lanez and two other people. She exited the car once but the others coaxed her back in—and the second time she tried to exit the car, she tells GQ, is when Lanez began shooting her in the feet.
“Like, I never put my hands on nobody,” Megan told GQ. “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.”
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Megan told GQ that after shooting her, Lanez begged her to keep quiet—even offering money to her and her friend. Lanez’s attorney denied the allegation when contacted by The Daily Beast, writing, “Mr. Peterson has never offered money to any witness for their silence or for any other reason. Any statement to the contrary is false.”
“[At this point] I'm really scared... because this is like right in the middle of all the protesting,” Megan said. “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.’”
The treatment Megan Thee Stallion’s shooting received was as disappointing as it was unsurprising. The case and its competing narratives were essentially tried on social media, while an endless wave of memes turned the entire case into a joke. Weeks after her shooting, Megan posted a tearful video in which she thanked her fans for their support and voiced a sentiment no human being should be forced to say aloud: “I didn’t deserve to get shot.”
“It’s nothing to joke about,” the rapper said. “It was nothing for y’all to start going and making up fake stories about. I didn’t put my hands on nobody... I didn’t do shit.”
Last month she took things a step further, writing an impassioned op-ed for the New York Times that discussed her experience within the context of how Black women are “constantly disrespected and disregarded in so many areas of life.”
“My initial silence about what happened was out of fear for myself and my friends,” Megan wrote. “Even as a victim, I have been met with skepticism and judgment. The way people have publicly questioned and debated whether I played a role in my own violent assault proves that my fears about discussing what happened were, unfortunately, warranted.”
“After a lot of self-reflection on that incident, I’ve realized that violence against women is not always connected to being in a relationship,” the rapper continued. “Instead, it happens because too many men treat all women as objects, which helps them to justify inflicting abuse against us when we choose to exercise our own free will.”
Lanez’s arraignment was postponed last month, and is now set for Wednesday. Ahead of the hearing the rapper was ordered to stay 100 yards away from Megan Thee Stallion and to cease any contact with her.
