Inside the exuberant and empowering rise of Megan Thee Stallion—the irreverent and magnetic rap sensation who’s here to stay.
Megan Thee Stallion has been silent for about 30 seconds, hoping that the tears gathering in her eyes don’t give way to a full-on cry. Thirty seconds feels longer than 30 seconds when you’re watching a person hold it together—trying to hide a cry face that probably hasn’t changed much since childhood.
We’ve arrived at this moment earlier than expected, the moment when she addresses the more-than-well-publicized incident that she described as “the worst experience of [her] life”—the shooting that she endured in July and the weeks that followed. A few hours before Megan and I meet, the man who allegedly shot her tweeted his intent to address the situation in some mysterious way later that night. And a few hours after our interview, he would release a whole album seemingly dedicated to defending himself, to seizing a narrative, to calling Megan a liar.
It may seem jarring to lay all this out at the beginning of the story, to start with a sudden cold plunge into a life-fracturing subject. In a year marked by undeniable success of Megan’s own making—the viral moments and omnipresent bops and joyous social media antics—this lone and shitty incident (that she didn’t create) has loomed persistently. Instead of sinking into the muck of a bad situation, Megan has chosen a way forward—not only by continuing to live her Hot Girl life, but also by transforming the ugliness of it all into an urgent message about how Black women in this country should be treated.
She presses her finger to a spot above her left eyelid, as if there’s an emergency Off button for her tear ducts hidden somewhere within the socket. She slides lower in her chair, parked on the top floor of the penthouse hotel suite she’s rented for the week. She’s dressed like she’s about to attend a particularly luxurious sleepover party—makeup-free, she’s wearing a cute red Kangol bucket hat and dusty-pink cashmere leisurewear so formfitting it must feel like a constant hug.
It isn’t so much the incident itself that’s upsetting her, though to listen to her explain what happened that night in July is tough. In her honeyed alto voice, she delicately tells me how she left a pool party in the Hollywood Hills and jumped into an SUV with the rapper Tory Lanez and two others. She didn’t even put clothes on over her bathing suit. The night was over; she was just going home.
Megan often tells herself, “Always trust your first mind”—her way of saying, “Listen to your gut.” That night, her first mind told her to get out of the car and find another way home. She tried exiting the vehicle to call for a different ride. But her phone died, it was late, she was in a bikini, and everyone was telling her to just get back in, so she did, even though there was an argument brewing. Megan doesn’t want to get into the specifics of the dispute—who started it, what it was about—but ultimately it doesn’t matter. As has been reported, when she tried to get out of the car again and walk away, according to Megan, Lanez started shooting at her feet, wounding her. She tells me the rest with disbelief still in her voice. “Like, I never put my hands on nobody,” she says. “I barely even said anything to the man who shot me when I was walking away. We were literally like five minutes away from the house.”
After he shot, she says, Lanez begged her not to say anything. She says he offered Megan and her friend money to stay quiet. “[At this point] I’m really scared,” Megan says, “because this is like right in the middle of all the protesting. Police are just killing everybody for no reason, and I’m thinking, ‘I can’t believe you even think I want to take some money. Like, you just shot me.’ ” (A lawyer for Lanez denied that the rapper offered Megan and her friend money.)
When the cops arrived, Megan says, she just wanted to avoid trouble—she worried they’d get arrested or end up victims of police brutality if they were found with a weapon. The first thing she said to the responding officers who noticed her bloodied feet was, “I got cut.”
Later, in October, Lanez would be charged with felony assault, but in the immediate aftermath, as details and questions dripped into the news and onto social media, the incident became the kind of “He said, she said” that Twitter loves to litigate.
Megan confirmed that she had been shot. People accused her of lying. Eventually, in August, she went on Instagram to name Lanez as her assailant. He denied it, creating a controversy that spawned insults, jokes, and memes made at Megan’s expense. Stories were leaked to the press, including screenshots of Lanez’s text apology. Members of Lanez’s team fabricated emails to undermine Megan’s account. Somehow, before the Los Angeles County district attorney had even weighed in, the case had been tried on social media—and improbably Megan had become, to some people, more of a villain than a victim. To her, the comments of critics seemed louder than ones from her supporters.
To defend herself, she felt compelled to reveal more than she’d wanted to—she posted a now deleted photo of her feet, with stitches, post-surgery, as proof that she had actually been injured. Finally, she tweeted: “Black women are so unprotected & we hold so many things in to protect the feelings of others w/o considering our own. It might be funny to y’all on the internet and just another messy topic for you to talk about but this is my real life and I’m real life hurt and traumatized.”
Megan had discussed all of it—the shooting itself, the social media shitstorm—with relative calm, but it’s recalling her decision to tweet this that kicks up all the emotion she’s struggling now to hold back. The simple feeling that she was out there alone, fighting for herself, and almost nobody took her pain seriously—as well as the realization that the same is endlessly true for other Black women, including the one who raised her.
She clears her throat. “When I was growing up, my mom didn’t have any help with me,” Megan says. “Everybody was doing everything that they could do to help. But it was only so much that my grandmother could do. And it was like, there’ll be times that I’m in an apartment with my mama and I know something’s wrong, but I don’t know what it is.” She pauses and tugs down on her hat. Megan’s mother, Holly Thomas, died from a brain tumor in March of 2019. They were incredibly close. When she was growing up in Houston, Megan says, her family wasn’t rich, but it was her mom who made her feel not just that she had everything she needed but that she wasn’t missing out on what she wanted, either.
Megan clears her throat again and begins to speak, this time like she’s addressing her mother directly. “Like, now, I’m understanding you got a lot on you; it’s a lot of pressure, but you’re not saying it to nobody. I know it’s probably just hard, to be a single mama trying to take care of yourself and your daughter. And you’re putting on a face.… You are acting like everything was okay so I feel comfortable.” Megan pauses and brings it back to what she’s experiencing right now: “I feel like a lot of Black girls learn that early. I did. I do that a lot.”
Throughout the strange weeks that followed the shooting, what surprised Megan most was that even though she had been a victim, she felt an expectation to project strength. “Like damn,” she says, “I have to be tough through all this? All the time? It was like, who really checks on us or who protected us? You just go your whole life with that mentality. And then when something actually happens to you, when you properly should have protected yourself, your first instinct was not to protect yourself, it was protecting other people.… So it was like, ‘What do I do?’ ‘What do I say?’ Like, ‘Is anybody going to believe what I’m saying?’ ”
Megan falls silent, giving herself another moment. She starts again carefully. “It was weird,” she says. “I saw something that said, ‘Check on your strong friends.’ And, like, a lot of people, they don’t do that because they think, Oh, this person is just so strong, so I know they got their stuff together.… I feel like I have to be strong for everybody, and I don’t want my friends or anybody around me to feel like it’s a pressure on me, ’cause I feel like they all start freaking out.”
She says she reached out to her friends and asked, “Why didn’t you call me?” And it helped. “Now they’re like calling me every five minutes,” she says with a laugh and a faux-petulant eye roll that lifts us out of the dark moment and into a lighter one.
