Rapper Tory Lanez has been sentenced to ten years in prison for shooting and wounding US hip hop star Megan Thee Stallion.
Prosecutors had asked a judge to hand down a 13-year sentence to 31-year-old Lanez, whose legal name is Daystar Peterson.
Lanez was convicted of three felonies: assault with a semiautomatic firearm, having a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle, and discharging a firearm with gross negligence.
Before being handed his sentence, Lanez addressed the court and said that he still considered himself and Megan Thee Stallion “friends”.
“That night was a night that everyone was drunk… I said some very immature things,” he said.
“If I could turn back the series of events… I would, but I can’t.
“But to think that I am some sort of callous individual is not the case. The victim was my friend… (and) she still is to this day.
“I did wrong that night and I take full responsibility and culpability for it.”
What happened?
Megan, whose real name is Megan Jovon Ruth Pete, testified during the trial that Lanez had fired the gun at the back of her feet and shouted for her to dance as she walked away from an SUV in which they had been riding in summer 2020.
The pair had left a party at Kylie Jenner’s Hollywood Hills home.
She has said she has suffered daily since the rapper shot her in the feet three years ago.
In a written statement read during Lanez’s sentencing, she said: “Since I was viciously shot by the defendant, I have not experienced a single day of peace.
“Slowly but surely, I’m healing and coming back, but I will never be the same.”
The 28-year-old hip-hop star, known for hits WAP and Savage, said she struggled with whether she would appear to give the statement in person, but said she “simply could not bring myself to be in a room with Tory again.”
She asked that her absence not be taken as a sign of indifference, and urged Judge David Herriford to issue a stiff sentence.
Lanez’s father, Sonstar Peterson, a Christian minister, was visibly emotional in court on Monday as he told the judge about his wife, Luella, dying just a few days after showing the first symptoms of a rare blood disorder that would lead to her death when Lanez was 11.
“I don’t think anybody ever gets over that,” he said of their youngest child, Lanez.
“But his music became his outlet.”
Other witnesses talked about Lanez nearly constant charitable giving even before fame and money from music came to him in 2017.
The mother of his son, Raina Cassagne, called him “the most supportive father, the funnest father.”
The judge said Lanez’s son, who is 6 years old, also sent in a handwritten letter, but Herriford did not describe it further.
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