After posting a preview on Sunday, CBS Mornings revealed Gayle King’s full chat with Megan Thee Stallion on Monday (April 25), in which, for the first time, the rapper sat for a television interview about her alleged shooting at the hands of Canadian rapper Tory Lanez.
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“I’m a victim,” she told King. “I’m the victim. I’m not defending myself against anything. Something happened to me!”
Megan explained that the alleged incident took place after she’d attended a party at Kylie Jenner’s house, with the interview folding in some footage of the two women seemingly taken that July 2020 day.
The Houston rapper says that after being at Jenner’s house all day, she was tired and ready to go home. When she got into a car with one of her oldest friends, Lanez (born Daystar Peterson) and two other women, Megan said an argument broke out between the pair of women in the backseat. She said she asked the driver to pull over and let her out, tearfully telling King that she should have stayed out of the car and never gotten back into it.
“And they was like, ‘Megan, just get back in the car we almost there,'” said the rapper, born Megan Pete. So she got back in and immediately the argument got worse. “And I don’t want to be in this car no more. Like, ’cause I see it’s getting crazy. So I get out of the car and it’s like everything happens so fast,” she said. “And all I hear is this man screaming. And he said, ‘Dance, b—h. And he started shooting. And I’m just like, ‘Oh, my God.’ Like, he shot a couple of times. And I … I was so scared.”
Lanez stands accused of one count of assault with a firearm and another gun possession charge over the 2020 incident. He has pleaded not guilty. Stallion initially told police officers that she cut her foot stepping on broken glass, but later revealed that she had suffered a gunshot wound. After media outlets reported that Lanez had fired the gun, she directly accused him in an August 2020 Instagram video.
In the interivew with King, Megan said the shooter was “standin’ up over the window shooting. And I didn’t even want to move. I didn’t want to move too quick. Like, ’cause I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. If I take the wrong step, I don’t know if he’s gonna shoot something that’s, like, super important. I don’t know if he could shoot me and kill me.'”
She described being afraid for her life because she had never been shot at before, and then looking down at her feet and not being sure if she was hit as the adrenaline was pumping hard through her system. “Like, I feel it. But I don’t understand what’s happening. So I looked down at my feet. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God,'” she said. “Like, I’m really bleeding. So I, like, drop down and I crawl in somebody’s driveway. Like, I can’t believe he shot me.”
Immediately after firing the shots, Megan said Lanez began apologizing to her and allegedly offering a huge sum of money if she would keep it quiet. “He’s [like], ‘I’m so sorry. Please don’t tell nobody. I’ll give y’all a million dollars if y’all don’t say nothing,'” she claims Lanez pleaded with her. “And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ Like, ‘Why are you offering me money right now?’ Help me. Like, and if you sorry, just help me!”
The car didn’t even make it to their destination, and Megan described a mob scene of police cars and helicopters greeting them, which made the rapper even more anxious. “I was, ‘Oh my God, we all about to die.’ The George Floyd incident had just happened, the police are very much ‘shoot first, ask questions after,'” Megan said of her mindset at the time, considering that she was bleeding and there was a “hot gun” in the car in the wake of the police killing of the unarmed Floyd in Minneapolis. “They about to kill somebody, something bad is about to happen,” she remembered thinking.
CBS rolled a TMZ video from that night, in which police ask everyone to slowly get out of the car, with Megan walking around in a bathing suit and leaving bloody footprints on the ground as she stands with her hands up above her head. And while she couldn’t remember everything the police said to her that night, Megan said they asked what happened to her, and because she didn’t “want them to kill any of us or shoot any of us,” she told them she’d stepped on glass.
“For some reason, I was just trying to protect all of us because I didn’t want them to kill us,” she told King by way of explaining why she didn’t point fingers at Lanez (who Megan does not refer to by name in the interview). “Like, even though this person just did — just did this to me, my first reaction still was to try to save us. Like, I didn’t want to see anybody die. So I just said, ‘I stepped on glass.'”
So when she sees people pointing to the false story about her foot getting cut by glass as proof that they think she lied about the incident, Megan said she was just trying to protect everyone in the car and now, honestly, she regrets her choice. “Sometimes I wish I really would have never said that,” she told King. “I wish I would have told … the truth. But I … if it saved all of us from dyin’, then that’s just probably what it was meant.”
CBS showed a series of texts from one of Meg’s friends in the car, Kelsey Harris, to the rapper’s security guard, in which she writes, “Help… Tory Shot Meg.”
Megan isn’t sure if the police believed her glass story, even when she told it again at the hospital. But when a doctor came in to tell her that she had bullet fragments in both feet — some of which remain in her body to this day — the rapper knew the real story would come out. “I really thought that we were all friends,” she added, explaining that when her mother died in March 2019, she began looking for “some type of family environment,” which resulted in her letting “so many people” into her inner circle.
When King asked if — as Lanez has suggested — the two had a sexual relationship or were dating, Megan said they were not dating and were never intimate, but were “very close” and hanging out every day. She also thought they’d bonded over both losing their mothers recently, but didn’t really know why he has claimed she made up the story about the shooting. As for why Lanez might have suggested otherwise, Megan said, “I think that he is trying to deflect from the fact that he committed a crime.”
Lanez’ attorney, Shawn Holley, said in a statement to CBS that “we look forward to addressing Ms. Pete’s claims — including all its inconsistencies, discrepancies and omissions — when this case goes to trial later this year.” Earlier this month, Lanez was handcuffed and put in custody during a court hearing after a judge ruled that he violated court orders in the criminal case, saying certain social media posts had breached court orders that required him to avoid any contact with Stallion as the case proceeds.
As for how her life has changed since the alleged shooting, Megan said her anxiety is worse and she’s gotten “very cold” to other people, which has resulted in her putting up a wall and not seeking out new friendships. “I’m trying to be as nice as I can to everybody … new people, I probably won’t even hold a conversation longer than 30 minutes ’cause I feel like every time I’m talking, I’m, like, on the verge of tears and I don’t want to have to explain to strangers why I’m crying,” she said.
Not holding back her tears, Megan said sometimes she just wants to call her mom and ask her for help. “It’s too much. I feel crazy. I’m sad and I feel like I have to hold it in,” she said.
Watch the interview below.
.@theestallion shares her story of the 2020 incident when she was shot in her feet, allegedly by Tory Lanez.
She says she initially told police she stepped on glass, because she feared for her life: “I was just trying to protect all of us because I didn't want them to kill us.” pic.twitter.com/qd4MJ1yN2w
— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) April 25, 2022