Megan Thee Stallion testifies about Tory Lanez shooting and sued streamer's online vitriol
Megan will return to the Miami federal courthouse on Friday for more cross-examination.
MIAMI — Rapper Megan Thee Stallion testified Thursday that she’s suing an online commentator for defamation because she’s tired of her “carrying on this narrative that I’m just such a bad person and I would lie to put an innocent man in jail.”
“I don’t like the way she speaks about me, my family, my friends, my fans,” Megan said. “I really don’t like the way that she made everybody go watch a very disgusting fake pornographic video of me.”
Megan, a 30-year-old Miami resident, will return to the witness stand Friday morning in a federal trial that alleges Houston, Texas,-based online streamer Milagro Cooper defamed her and intentionally infected emotional distress on her by coordinating with her rapper Tory Lanez, who’s serving a 10-year prison sentence for shooting Megan in 2020.
A third claim alleges Milagro promoted a digitally altered sexual depiction of Megan, in what could be the first judicial test of a Florida law enacted last year.
Megan’s lawyers played the video during opening statements on Monday, which she testified was “really embarrassing to have to look at a bunch of people you don’t know see you in a position like that,”
“Like, I know it’s not me, but being in front of everybody else, and they have to watch it … it’s really embarrassing,” she testified, tearing up.
She learned of the video from her friend Travis Farris shortly after it surfaced on the Internet in June 2024 “and my heart just sank.”
“I felt like, ‘Here we go,’” Megan said.
She later tearfully recalled not “feeling like existing anymore”
“I don’t want to be here. I’m tired of waking up. I didn’t care what happened. I just wanted to tie. I was so tired of being alive,” she testified.
She cried as she said she thinks Milagro and Lanez want her to kill herself.
“So I can’t kill myself because I don’t want to give them what they’re looking for,” she said.
She said maybe she’s experiencing this pain because there could be “another woman out there going through that” could draw courage from seeing her “come out the other side.”
“All the things that I went through and I’m still going through hopefully can inspire other women to want to tell their truth,” she testified.
Legal name Megan Pete, the three-time Grammy winner testified for nearly three hours on Thursday then returned to the witness stand Friday morning for continued cross-examination. During her nearly two-hour direct exam, she recounted Lanez shooting her five years ago his trial and conviction, and her quickly dashed hope that people would accept his conviction and move on.
She differentiated Milagro, who streams online under the names Milagro Gramz and Mobz Radio, from other influencers who criticize her such as Joe Budden and DJ Akademiks, who had large followings long before Megan was shot.
“Milagro is somebody who started gaining bang and getting attention once she started talking about me, that’s the difference. You are the only person who is being a mouthpiece for Tory,” she said.
She said seeing Milagro in person for the first time in trial “is weird, because online, I hear her talking about me, and I wonder … why does this person feel so strongly about any and everything I do?”
“Seeing her in person I’m like, ‘Wow, we really don’t know each other, and you act this way,” Megan testified.
Megan appeared to speak directly to Milagro, who was sitting at the defense table.
“You are the only person who, for five years, has been constantly calling me out of my name, speaking about my mom, my dad, my grandfather,” she said. “You are the only person that I saw promoting a video telling everybody, ‘Go to my likes.’”
“Sometimes to this day, I feel a little like defeated” because she believes Milagro “wanted it to be real.”
Megan’s lawyer Joanna Menillo, an associate with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP, in New York, asked Megan to read aloud her post from June 8, 2024.
“It’s really sick how y’all go out of the way to hurt me when you see me winning. Y’all going too far, Fake ass shit. Just know today was your last day playing with me and I mean it.”
Megan said she decided that day “that I was going to sue Milagro,” and Milagro’s rants continued.
“It’s the same thing over and over,” she said.
Menillo played a recording of Milagro saying she heard someone say Megan “has a drinking problem” and has “had to have therapy.”
Megan said she believes Lanez told Milagro to label Megan an alcoholic with a family of alcoholics.
“Again, I don’t know Milagro, and Milagro doesn’t know me, and a lot of my family is deceased,” she said. “So why do you sound so sure talking about my family?”
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Megan said Milagro’s tweet falsely stating Lanez’s DNA wasn’t on the gun reiterated her belief that the two were working together. She said Lanez’s court dates were “just such a dreadful day for me, because I just knew what Tory was doing.”
“People still think that Tory did not shoot me because Milagro tweeted that his DNA was not on the gun. That’s not true,” she said.
Megan also testified about seeing Lanez chopping up an apparent horse leg in his “Cap” music video.
“I felt like nobody cared that I was shot. Everybody was making jokes about it. Everybody is minimizing what happened to me,” she said.
“I’m looking at this video and I’m like, Are you saying that you’re going to do this to me? Like, are you saying you’re going to chop me up?” Megan continued.
Menillo displayed Milagro’s post, “Daystar, is that a horse’s leg?” with a laughing emoji.
“I looked at it and I thought, why does this lady — this Black lady — think that this is funny that a man is chopping up another Black woman?” Megan testified. “Why do you think violence against me is funny?”
Megan sent herself a screenshot of the video with the horse’s leg circled because she was sending stuff she saw online to her manager and asking, “Is this normal, Like, is this OK? Like, what can I do to get him to stop doing stuff like this?”
Menillo began the exam by asking Megan about the death of her mother, who Megan described as a “a really good mom, really good provider.”
“I had a really good childhood. … Like, I didn’t know we, like, weren’t rich when I was little, because she just bought me so much,” Megan testified.
Her mother jumped into help when “she figured out, like, rapping was something I really wanted to do when I was like 18, 19. Her mother was hospitalized with a brain tumor in 2019, and Megan “had to make a decision what to do with my mom” when it became apparent she wouldn’t regain consciousness.
Later in the exam, Megan teared up as she testified about Milagro saying her mother is a thief and implying her father is on drugs.
“People know how to upset me, because I really, really love my mom, and I’m really still very sensitive about my mom passing away,” she testified. She said she never knew her father to use drugs.
“I only seen my daddy be a good, strong man,” Megan said.
Megan said Farris sending her Bible verse Psalm 69:4 helped her at the time because she “kind of thought, ‘Hey, if Jesus be going through this, then I guess I could do it, too.” But she still felt hopeless.
She said therapy has been difficult because “I wasn’t really receiving what any of the therapists were saying.”
“Because logically, I know I’ve been shot. It happened to me. I tried to move on. … I knew logically that the truth was on my side,” she said, but seeing social media claiming she lied was difficult.
She said the online narratives shifted from ‘stepping on glass to wrestling with a gun and shooting herself to Kelsey [Harris] shot her,” and people only cared about what Lanez said, not what she said.
“Everybody feels like I deserve to get shot because I talk about sex and I twerk and I drink,” she said. “Just all these things that have nothing to do with me being shot.”
She said people still seems to “believe that I am the kind of person who will put somebody in jail on purpose for no reason.”
“That really bothers me,” she said.
About 75 minutes into her testimony, Megan recounted for Menillo how Lanez shot her as she walked away from an SUV in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles early on July 12, 2020.
She said she and Kelsey were arguing with Lanez when she got out of the car and Lanez “convicted me to get back in the car.”
“I get out of the car safe time, and as I’m walking away, he shoots me,” she testified.
“So you have your back to him?” Menillo asked.
“Yes,” Megan answered.
“How are you able to know that he was the one who shot you?” Menillo asked.
“I didn’t have to turn my whole body around to see Tory. All I had to do was turn my torso and I saw him with a gun,” she said.
“Did he say anything to you before he shot you?” Menillo asked.
“He said, ‘Dance, bitch,’” Megan answered.
Megan recalled “just freezing” then looking at her feet “and I saw all the blood, and I just dropped to the ground.”
She said she doesn’t “remember exactly how it happened,” but “when I spoke to Kelsey she said he was pulling her hair and punching her.”
She got back in the car with Lanez “because I just wanted him to take me to Farris.”
She and Kelsey were “freaking out” and “crying” in the car, she said.
“Tory is saying, ‘Now, please don’t see anything. I’ll give y’all a million dollars.’ And I’m like, ‘You just shot me. Like, what? What are we talking about right now?’” Megan testified.
She told police she stepped on glass because “I was trying to protect all of us.”
“I was scared that the police might have shot us,” Megan testified. She said she wished she’d told them that night that Lanez shot her.
She said she falsely Gayle King of CBS News that she didn’t have sex with Lanez because she was “embarrassed,” but she testified truthfully during Lanez’s trial.
“There are some embarrassing people on the list of people you slept with, and Tory is my biggest embarrassment. So of course I told Gayle King, ‘No, I didn’t have sex in Tory,” Megan said.
She said she’s no longer friends with Kelsey because Kelsey “took a bribe from Tory to not say anything about what happened that night.” She said in cross-examination that she and Kelsey “never argued about Tory.”
She said she felt “vindicated” when Lanez was convicted and believed “people are going to know that I’m not a liar” and not someone who would “put an innocent Black man in jail.”
Menillo played a recording of Milagro telling Akademiks after Lanez’s trial that the idea that “I’m misogynistic and identify more with males, because I’m asking for accountability from women and from her really, in particular in this case, it’s ridiculous to me, because at the end of the day, accountability does need to be had for the lies that we’re told.”
The recording is one of several statements about lies and perjury that are the basis for the defamation claim.
Milagro’s lawyer Jeremy McLymont cross-examined Megan for about an hour on Thursday and will continue Friday at 8 a.m. at the federal courthouse in Miami. I’ll have an entire article on the cross later on Friday.
Jurors on Thursday also saw deposition clips from Lanez and his father, and they heard testimony from Milagro’s former moderator, who broke down sobbing as he recalled quitting amid mounting online toxicity and differences with Milagro about her direction. I’ll have details in the next article.
Court documents:
Nov. 16 contempt order against Lanez
Nov. 13 Megan’s exhibit list
Nov. 13 Megan’s witness list
Oct. 30 judge rejects Lanez’s motion to quash
Oct. 9 sanctions order for deleted texts
Sept. 16 Aidin Ross’ motion to quash
Aug. 14 transcript of Milagro’s deposition
Aug. 1 order re: Lanez’s deposition
April 16 contempt motion for Lanez
April 16 transcript of Lanez’s deposition
Feb. 10 most recent complaint
Dec. 23, 2024 motion to dismiss
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