LOS ANGELES (AP) — A$AP Rocky ‘s legal professionals will make their case and attempt to set up a counternarrative Friday at his trial in Los Angeles, the place the hip-hop star and style mogul is charged with firing a gun at a former pal on a Hollywood avenue in 2021.
They plan to name to the stand rapper A$AP Twelvyy, who, like each the defendant and the person he is charged with capturing, was a member of the A$AP Mob, a gaggle of younger artists and creators that shaped at a New York highschool practically 20 years in the past.
Twelvyy was certainly one of two members of the crew who accompanied Rocky to a meetup with A$AP Relli, with whom he had a long-simmering beef that got here to a head, he stated, when Rocky fired a gun at him.
Twelvyy is anticipated to testify that Rocky fired a starter pistol that solely shoots blanks, which he carries as a prop for safety. The protection contends that the phony gun solutions many questions on the case, together with why Relli solely had grazed knuckles and no different accidents.
The possibly complicated set of “A$AP” names have grow to be acquainted to folks within the courtroom, and probably the jury, via the roughly three days of Relli’s testimony, which makes up the majority of prosecutors’ case, rested on Thursday.
Rocky has pleaded not responsible to 2 felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm, and if convicted on each, he can legally rise up to 24 years in jail.
Rihanna, the celebrity singer who’s Rocky’s longtime companion and the mom of their toddler sons, slipped into the courtroom Thursday afternoon and sat in Rocky’s part after a number of days of absence. She had her hair up and wore glasses with a tan trenchcoat on a wet day in LA.
The protection has not stated whether or not Rocky will take the appreciable threat of occurring the stand himself, which he’s not legally required to do. He already opted to take a major threat by turning down the prosecution’s pre-trial supply of a advisable sentence of simply 180 days in jail and different comparatively minor penalties in trade for a responsible plea on one depend.
Raised in Harlem, the Grammy nominee had his mainstream breakthrough when his first studio album went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2013.
However his position as a style maven has nearly eclipsed his music. He’s set to be a star co-host on style’s largest evening, the Met Gala, in Could.
The fits he wears within the courtroom and the overcoats he wears exterior it have grow to be fodder for dialogue and impressed a New York Instances story on his fashion.
A publicist for Yves Saint Laurent despatched a information launch, of the type normally reserved for purple carpets, saying that in the future in court docket he was sporting an “Yves jacket in wool chine,” a “shirt in silk crepe de chine” and “high-waisted pants in wool chine.”
His style sense even got here up in telephone recordings performed in court docket, by which an individual presupposed to be Relli declares that Rocky was “not a true gangster” and that “this is the case of Dior.”
The protection has already introduced one witness it was allowed to name early, an web branding advisor who labored with each Rocky and Relli. He recorded telephone calls, purportedly with Relli saying his major intention was to get hundreds of thousands from Rocky, and the felony case did not matter.
Relli stated in his testimony that the recordings had been faux.
However prosecutor John Lewin established that all the pieces Relli stated in them was constant together with his testimony.
