Hip-hop star A$AP Rocky is found not guilty in firearm case, avoiding prison

LOS ANGELES — A$AP Rocky dove from the defense table into the arms of Rihanna Tuesday as a clerk read the not guilty verdict at his trial on two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm.

The Los Angeles courtroom, full of fans of the hip-hop performer and his singing superstar partner, exploded into screaming glee as Rocky and Rihanna embraced and sobbed.

After a three-week trial, the jury deliberated for just three hours to reach the verdict that spared Rocky, whose legal name is Rakim Mayers, a prison sentence that could have run more than two decades.

“Thank y’all for saving my life,” he told the jurors as they left the Los Angeles courtroom.

Amid the chaos, it took the clerk a while to read the second not guilty verdict, though it was very unlikely the jury would split on the counts.

On the eve of the trial, Rocky turned down a prosecution offer of just six months in jail, along with probation and other conditions, if he would plead guilty to one count.

Insisting on his innocence, Rocky decided to gamble that a jury would feel the same. It paid off. The jurors felt at least that there was reasonable doubt of his guilt.

Rihanna cried and hugged the defense lawyers, as did Rocky. She attended the trial sporadically and brought the couple’s two sons — 2-year-old RZA Athelston Mayers and 1-year-old Riot Rose Mayers — for some of the closing arguments.

The verdict came at the height of Rocky’s fame, if not the pinnacle of his music career. The three-time Grammy nominee, fashion mogul and actor has a banner year in the works, and can now look to it without the threat of prison hanging over him. He is scheduled to headline the Rolling Loud music festival in March; he is one of the celebrity co-chairs of fashion’s biggest night, the Met Gala, in May; and he stars with Denzel Washington in director Spike Lee’s film Highest 2 Lowest, set for release in early summer.

Prosecutors and their witnesses said that he was beefing with a former friend, A$AP Relli, with whom he had been in a crew who called themselves the A$AP Mob since high school. They said the two men met up in Hollywood on Nov. 6, 2021, and after a scuffle Rocky pulled the gun and fired twice at Relli, who said one of the shots grazed his knuckle but was not seriously hurt.

Rocky’s lawyer Joe Tacopina said in his closing argument that Relli is “an angry pathological liar” who “committed perjury again and again and again and again.”

Rocky’s lawyers and witnesses they called said Rocky had shot a prop gun that only fires blanks, which he had been carrying for security since taking it from a music video set months earlier. They said he fired it as a warning because Relli was attacking another member of their crew.

The jurors were told that despite three years passing since the incident, no one mentioned the phony gun to authorities until the day jury selection began at the trial.

They were also instructed that if they found that Rocky reasonably believed that he or one of the two friends with him that night were in imminent danger of injury, and that he used reasonable force, they could find the defendant not guilty.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether they reached the verdict because they believed he was in fact carrying a prop gun or that he acted in self-defense. They did not have to agree on their reasoning, or explain it outside of the jury room. They just had to reach the same conclusion.

Rocky opted not to testify in his own defense.

In his closing argument, Deputy District Attorney John Lewin urged the jurors not to be influenced by the celebrity or family aspects of the case, and suggested Rihanna bringing the kids to closing arguments was an attempt to manipulate the jury.

“You are not allowed to consider how this might affect Rihanna and his kids,” the prosecutor said. “We are all responsible for our own actions in the world.”

After the verdict, Tacopina said outside the courthouse that “Rocky did not want her here, I will tell you that.”

He said Rocky “wanted to shield her from this. Wild horses couldn’t keep her away.”

“I can’t imagine this has been anything but a life-altering experience for them,” he said.