“I was just trying to build something that felt good all around me,” she said. “But looking back, it was the worst year of my life.”
Megan, Lanez and her longtime friend Kelsey Harris got into a fight heading home from a party on July 12, 2020. An offended Lanez told Megan to “dance” before shooting at her feet, according to court testimony. A neighbour who saw what happened called 911, and when police arrived, Megan – who later said she feared Lanez could have been killed by police – initially told them that she had stepped on glass. The truth emerged after she was taken to the hospital and bullet fragments were found in her feet.
Megan – who embraces sexuality in her art, with twerking performances and hits such as WAP – has faced misogynistic attacks and trolls since long before the shooting. Afterwards, her critics went into overdrive, picking apart her conflicting statements in the wake of the incident. Besides initially misleading police, she had denied having a sexual relationship with Lanez in a highly publicised interview with Gayle King – only to later testify in court that the two had been sexually involved for a brief time. Megan said she told King otherwise because she thought it was irrelevant to the shooting.
Several internet personalities, such as DJ Akademiks, used her conflicting stories and inaccurate statements to downplay her story. “Megan’s story doesn’t hold as much weight as it did before,” Sonnybabie, a TikToker, said in a video featured in the documentary, which also cited a handful of influencers who questioned whether Lanez was the shooter, or claimed there was no evidence that she was shot.
Around the time of the 2022 trial, social media trolls shared the hashtag “Free Tory Lanez,” and male celebrities including Chris Brown, Meek Mill and 50 Cent discounted Megan’s experience and praised Lanez’s music. (50 Cent later apologised for the memes he shared.) In one clip, Sean “Diddy” Combs called Lanez “one of my favourite R&B artists”.
Anxiety, nightmares and mental and physical fatigue caught up to Megan, she said, and documentary footage showed her agitation after she hosted and held back tears during her performance of Anxiety on Saturday Night Live in 2022. In November of that year, the new documentary reveals, she went on a mental health retreat after being bedridden for three days and having suicidal thoughts: “I didn’t feel like I was worthy, and I didn’t feel like my life had any kind of value,” she said.
The day before the trial, she said, “I’m just ready for everybody to eat their … words.”
Lanez was convicted of felony assault with a deadly weapon in December 2022 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. But the falsehoods didn’t stop.
One of Megan’s lawyers, Alex Spiro, promised in 2022 to explore all legal options against bloggers who have spread misinformation against her. Using different attorneys, Megan filed a lawsuit earlier this week against hip-hop blogger Milagro Gramz in the Southern District of Florida, accusing her of cyberstalking among other forms of harassment, and asserting that Gramz was working with Lanez to act as an “online rumour mill churning out falsehoods.” The damages exceed $75,000, she says.
The lawsuit is reminiscent of defamation lawsuits filed by celebrities against celebrity gossip YouTuber Tasha K. Cardi B, who’s collaborated with Megan on WAP and Bongos, was awarded nearly US$4 million ($6.7m) in damages in 2022 for false statements Tasha K made. And Kevin Hart has an ongoing lawsuit accusing the YouTuber of trying to extort him out of US$250,000 ($419,181) by threatening to publish a defamatory interview.
In Megan’s complaint against Gramz, the rapper’s lawyers pointed to several allegedly false assertions that Gramz shared with her social media followers, including claims posted this week that the firearm Lanez used to shoot Megan was missing and another statement questioning whether Lanez actually shot the Houston native. In June, Gramz shared an X post of a deepfake pornographic video of Megan.
Unite the People, a nonprofit law firm that lists Lanez among its advisory members, said in a press release that they have taken on Gramz as a client.
“Unite the People Inc will not stand by and let an intractable justice system or a billion-dollar Corporation ran by popular celebrities take advantage of the small guy in an attempt to silence someone from their First Amendment right of free speech,” said the group’s CEO, Ceasar McDowell.
Gramz shared she was being accused of a “campaign of harassment and cyberbullying” in a post on X. “Of course we’ll chat about it,” she added. “They threw in the tape too.” In a separate post, she said, “countersuit gone go crazy”.
