Pop Culture

Megan Thee Stallion On Shooting Skeptics: “I’m the Victim”

The rapper sat down with Gayle King for her first interview about the 2020 incident that left her shot by Tory Lanez.

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Megan Thee Stallion appears on CBS Mornings on April 25, 2022.Courtesy of CBS Photos Archive

This morning, Megan Thee Stallion spoke at length with Gayle King about the July 2020 Los Angeles incident in which she was shot in the foot following a party at Kendall Jenner’s home. Megan reasserted that Tory Lanez fired the gun after she got out of a car she had been in with Lanez, his driver and a friend of hers.

“Everything happens so fast. And all I hear is this man screaming. And he said, ‘Dance, bitch.’ And he started shooting.” Megan recalled. “He shot a couple of times and I was so scared.” An onlooker called the police, and Megan told King that she was afraid to tell them she had been shot because they might escalate the situation.

“The George Floyd incident had just happened, the police are very much shoot first, ask questions after, so I’m like, ‘It’s a hot gun in the car, I’m bleeding. I’ve been shot. They’re about to kill somebody. Something bad is about to happen,’” she said.

Instead, Megan told the police that she had stepped on broken glass: “I was just trying to protect all of us, because I don’t want them to kill us. Even though this person just did this to me, my first reaction still was to try to save us. I didn’t want to see anybody die.” She was taken to a hospital for treatment, but said that some small fragments of the bullets remain in her feet to this day. Megan also acknowledged that she has regretted not mentioning the gun to the police from the outset.

CBS News also obtained text messages sent from Megan’s friend who was in the car to her bodyguard, which read “Tory shot Meg.”

Megan refuted Lanez’s claim that the two had a sexual relationship, and said that they had become close friends in part because they were both grieving over the loss of their mothers. “I feel like I put the blame on myself because when my mom passed, I just felt like I was looking for some type of family environment. And I was letting so many people in,” she told King. “I didn’t care who it was. I just wanted to feel like I got family and I got people that care about me.”

Lanez has pleaded not guilty to the shooting, but was arrested in early April for violating a “pre-trial protective order.” In August 2020, Megan named Lanez as the shooter in an Instagram Live following skepticism from a vocal subsection of social media users. “Yes, this n-gga Tory shot me. You shot me, and you got your publicist and your people going to these blogs, lying and shit,” she explained. In a 2020 interview with GQ, Megan said Lanez offered her money not to speak publicly about the shooting, and in the CBS interview she claimed that the exact sum was $1 million.

Lanez has stoked skepticism in the years since, via social media and Daystar, an album almost totally dedicated to his side of the story. He’s also antagonized Meg in some places, like a video with (Meg’s once frequent collaborator) DaBaby that features Lanez brandishing guns, with a special close-up on his feet. Meg had words for anyone who feels like she’s lying about the way things went down: “I know this happened to me. I’d rather it play out in court and the facts come out and everything comes out than me having to plead my case. I’m the victim,” she said. “I’m not defending myself against anything. Something happened to me.”

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