More and more, the conversation about protection—especially for women—for those coming up in the music industry keeps being brought to the fore. Earlier this year, the message was heard loud and clear with Chappell Roan, attempting to “Gen Z-ify” fame by trying to establish “healthy boundaries” (in this parasocial economy?!) between her and her fans. Except that she wouldn’t put the people stalking and harassing her into said category…nor would most of the pop stars who’ve had to deal with stalker/troll behavior. This includes, of course, Megan Thee Stallion, who has continued to grapple with the fallout of simply telling the truth about what happened to her in mid-summer of 2020. An event that, by now, even the most casual of pop culture “noticers” are aware of.
And it’s a trauma that Thee Stallion revisits again in her Nneka Onuorah-directed documentary, Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Words. A trauma she keeps having to relive largely because she’s still suffering from the “consequences” of someone else’s violent, totally out of line actions. Someone that a significant sect of people would prefer to keep on a pedestal at any cost—even at the price of feeding into the misogyny of a society that essentially declares: women are guilty until proven innocent. And even then, they’re not that innocent. Because, surely, if they “invoked” a man to do something, they must have been “asking for it.” Whether dressing “too provocatively” or acting like a “bitch,” it’s always somehow “the woman’s” fault for “making” a man behave like an animal.
Alas, like many things that Thee Stallion traces to “where it all went wrong” in her personal life, she mentions the fact that, were it not for the sudden death of her mother, Holly Thomas, from a brain tumor no one knew she had, Megan probably wouldn’t have gone down a rabbit hole of insecurity and self-medicating in order to cope with the pain. An insecurity and self-medicating that led her to Tory Lanez. This in addition to making a long-time so-called best friend named Kelsey Harris her assistant/all-around go-to for the emotional support and guidance her mother once provided. As Megan explains it in the documentary, “When my mama passed away, I think I really forgot who I was. And I lost a lot of confidence. I was expecting somebody to say, ‘I’m gonna run this for you. Don’t do that Megan. Don’t say that, you should rap like this, you should say it like that.’ I was so used to my mama tellin’ me what to do, and when life started getting crazy, I didn’t have her.” And it’s true that, of all the worst possible times for Holly to die, doing so just before her daughter truly hit the upper echelons of the big time with “Hot Girl Summer” in August of 2019 (featuring her not yet nemesis, Nicki Minaj) was more than “kind of” peak bad timing—along with Megan’s grandmother dying the same month.
While some female musicians end up wishing their family was dead (see: Britney Spears) because of the way they get treated by them as though they’re nothing more than machines/cash cows (see also: Jennette McCurdy), Thee Stallion is one of the cases in which starting out with her mother as a key supporter of her aspirations was a blessing, not a curse (as is the case with other artists like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Charli XCX). Losing that built-in support system she had before becoming massively famous was what sent her into such a tailspin. And with the music industry and its hangers-on being notoriously predatory whenever sensing a “weakness” (read: humanity) in someone, Thee Stallion’s vulnerable state served as blood in the proverbial shark-infested waters. With Lanez being one such shark. And as he approached to the tune of the Jaws theme, Thee Stallion recalls of that time in her life, “I just keep gettin’ lit thinkin’ I’m gonna get through this pain and Tory was one of the people I just started hangin’ out with.”
This was fresh off Thee Stallion’s additional ascent post-“Savage Remix” featuring Beyoncé in April 2020—and Lanez was definitely capitalizing on Megan’s much more clout-laden status (despite his ego insisting he was just as “big” as Thee Stallion, even though, to be honest, most people outside of a certain listenership had never heard of him until she came out with this shooting revelation). And yes, Megan had (and has) more influence in the culture in spite of Lanez already having four studio albums out at the time—soon to be five after he decided to make an entire album maintaining his innocence vis-à-vis the shooting and further insisting Megan was the liar creating a smear campaign against him. Called Daystar (Lanez’s real name being Daystar Peterson), a large bulk of the songs address the shooting in some way, prompting Thee Stallion, in turn, to commence her debut LP, Good News, with a track called “Shots Fired.” On it, she accuses Lanez of being, above all else, a “pussy” and a “clout chaser.” Something she realized about him after it was already too late.
Indeed, in the documentary, Megan mentions, “My daddy always told me, ‘Everything that grin ain’t your friend’” as an archival TikTok video shows Lanez doing just that while he stands next to Megan, boxing her out of the shot with his shit-eating grin. As Thee Stallion soon found out, her own “best friend” had that same grin not to be trusted, for she ended up turning her back on Thee Stallion as a witness by saying she “didn’t remember” who shot the gun (this despite a text to Thee Stallion’s bodyguard that summed up the truth in three words: “Tory shot meg”). This “suddenly I can’t read” approach to the incident was a direct result of Harris’ jealousy—not only of Megan’s success in general, but the fact that she also got it on with Lanez after Harris already was and then found out about it later. Lanez would, of course, try to use this to his advantage in discrediting the “accusation” against him as nothing more than a squabble between two “bitches,” tweeting, “Good dick had me fucking 2 best friends… and I got caught. That’s what I apologized 4. It’s sick how u Spun it tho…” Or there is no “spinning” the reality that he shot at Thee Stallion and managed to clip her feet by way of the bullet shrapnel (pieces of which remain in her feet to this day because they were too small to remove).
Despite Megan Thee Stallion’s account of the events that occurred on July 12, 2020 holding up in a court of law, there is an ongoing smear campaign against her in favor of “believing” Tory Lanez, the party responsible for shooting at her that night. It was a backlash that intensified once Lanez was charged with a crime, coinciding with the October 13, 2020 release of an op-ed piece Megan wrote for The New York Times titled “Why I Speak Up for Black Women.” Among other injustices (both personal and general) discussed in the article, Thee Stallion remarked, “The way people have publicly questioned and debated whether I played a role in my own violent assault proves my fears about discussing what happened were, unfortunately, warranted. After a lot of self-reflection on that incident, I’ve realized that violence against women is not always connected to being in a relationship. Instead, it happens because too many men treat all women as objects, which helps them to justify inflicting abuse against us when we choose to exercise our own free will.”
And, for whatever reason, even something as simple as telling the truth is deemed “too much” free will for women, especially if it makes a man look like the twat he is. The structure of Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Words starts to become built entirely around Thee Stallion’s unraveling mental state after the shooting and in the months leading up to the trial, when she knows she’ll have to be in Lanez’s midst yet again. The trauma of everything that had happened to her since she became rap and hip hop’s new goddess suddenly coalescing into one giant albatross spurring on her newfound sense of anxiety, particularly while performing live. Per Thee Stallion, “Ever since I been shot, I started having anxiety about performing. I always think somebody gon’ do somethin’ to me. I see so many guys online say, ‘You shoulda got shot in the head.’ ‘Oh he should’ve finished the job, should’ve killed your ass. ‘You always twerkin’ bitch, you deserve what you got.’” Thee Stallion then adds, “Am I safe to perform in front of thousands of people? I don’t know who in this crowd.”
All of which begs the question: what safeguards are really in place for musicians (women especially) who suffer from these unique perils and mental health risks of their profession? The answer, of course, is: there are none. Which is why, without any “Establishment resources,” some women are starting to create their own. This includes Kesha, who suffered another illustrious music industry nightmare (personally and legally) with Dr. Luke, and has now founded her own record label where new-to-the-business artists can feel safe and protected in a way that still hasn’t been normalized.
Thee Stallion, too, took mental health matters into her hands by launching a mental health resources website in 2022 called Bad Bitches Have Bad Days Too (a nod to her Traumazine song, “Anxiety”), which is given a nod in the documentary. Eventually, perhaps even the aforementioned Chappell Roan will create some kind of “space”/safeguard for young female (binary or otherwise) musicians as well. However, unlike Roan, Thee Stallion doesn’t have the luxury of being a more “well looked after” white woman. Because it’s still presumed that Black women—particularly Black women rappers—are “tough” enough to handle whatever abuse, threats of violence or actual violence comes their way.
With Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Words, Megan is shouting from the mountaintops that such a presumptive stereotype is not the case. And that, yes, there needs to be a better system (hell, any system in the first place) implemented to protect female artists from the rampant misogyny that they’re subjected to on a daily basis and that, consequently, wreaks havoc on their mental well-being, body image and overall sense of identity.
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