LOS ANGELES (CN) — A$AP Rocky’s attorneys added more details to their ‘prop gun’ defense on Monday, angering prosecutors and further testing the judge’s patience.
The three-time Grammy-nominee and father of pop star Rihanna’s children, whose real name is Rakim Mayers, is facing two counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm. Prosecutors say he fired two bullets at his estranged friend from high school, Terell Ephron, also known as A$AP Relli, who emerged from the incident nearly unharmed, save for scrapes on three of his knuckles. Ephron says the wounds came from bullets.
Weeks before the trial began, Mayers’ attorneys wheeled out an improbable sounding defense: that their famous client did have a gun that night and did fire the two shots, but the weapon was a prop gun he’d gotten on a music video shoot, and the bullets were blanks. The story, which had gone unmentioned during both the police investigation and preliminary hearing, did explain why security camera footage showed Mayers brandishing the gun in a scuffle with Ephron minutes before the shooting. Another piece of security video, taken from around the corner, captured the sound of two shots being fired.
However, the defense had little evidence to back the story up, besides testimony from a handful of Mayers’ friends. The prop gun itself was nowhere to be found. But on Monday morning, the court was made aware of another late realization by defense attorneys. They say Mayer’s tour manager, Louis Levin, had taken the prop gun and returned it to the director of the music video for Mayers’ song “D.M.B.,” a song about Rihanna. And the director was prepared to verify the story, giving the elusive prop gun a provenance, if nothing else.
“This is late discovery,” Superior Court Judge Mark Arnold said in court.
“I’m not casting aspersions,” he said, but quickly added: “I’m not accepting that it was inadvertent.”
Arnold ruled that Levin could share his story of the prop gun’s return to New York, but also that prosecutors could record an interview with the music video director, and that footage of the interview could be used to impeach Levin, if prosecutors wanted.
Deputy District Attorney John Lewin was able to illustrate the seemingly absurd logic of the prop gun defense while cross-examining Mayers’ longtime friend, Jamel Phillips, who was present on the night of the alleged shooting. Phillips testified last week that all of Mayers’ friends — including Ephron — knew that Mayers carried around a prop gun in order to deter physical threats. In fact, Phillips said that when Mayers pulled out the gun that night in 2021, Ephron said, “Shoot that fake ass gun!”
Why then would Mayers even bother to fire it? And why would he fire the first shot into the ground?
“It was the sound from the prop,” Phillips reiterated on Monday. “Also the sound from the car alarms,” he said, referring to the car alarms that were set off from the loud shots.
Lewin then asked Phillips why he never told investigators about the prop gun.
“I didn’t have a particular reason,” Phillips said. “I felt like I could tell my truth here.”
“I never been in a situation where you could just go to the law and tell them that this person is innocent,” he added.
The testimony by Louis Levin, Mayers’ former assistant turned tour manager who goes by the moniker A$AP Lou, was in much the same vein. Levin said he had been one of the people who suggested that Mayers start carrying around a prop gun after he had been the victim of a home invasion and a stalker.
“I thought it would be a good idea,” Levin said. “A nonlethal form of self defense.”
“Everybody knew that Rocky carried a prop gun,” he added.
Police found little physical evidence of the Hollywood shooting. Ephron, meanwhile, returned to the scene of the shooting an hour after it occurred and claims to have recovered 9 mm shell casings ejected by the handgun.
And so the prosecution has only fragments of evidence: short snippets of imperfect security camera footage and shell casings supposedly recovered by the victim, Ephron. They never found the gun they say Mayers’ used. They did, however, find another fragment in Mayers’ closet: a semiautomatic handgun’s magazine, fully loaded with 9mm bullets. Mayers, it should be noted, has a license to carry a concealed handgun in public.
On Monday, Levin, as expected, testified that the magazine belonged to him. He said not only had he mistakenly left the magazine at Rocky’s house, months after the shooting, but he had mistakenly bought the magazine clip, which doesn’t work with any of Levin’s handguns. It’s another story that is only now emerging. Lewin challenged Levin and suggested the story had been fabricated to exonerate Mayers — a sometimes employer of Levin.
“I didn’t have to come up with a story,” Levin said. “It was the truth.”
John Lewin is among the more famous line prosecutors in LA, thanks to his appearance in the HBO docuseries “The Jinx,” about the murderer Robert Durst, whom Lewin prosecuted. He has grown increasingly agitated throughout the trial, clashing repeatedly with Mayers’ attorney, Joe Tacopina, and has been repeatedly admonished by the judge.
Lewin described what he thought of the story: “You loaded a magazine for a gun you didn’t have with ammunition you didn’t know went into it, and then loaded the whole thing.”
“Are you aware that this is what’s called a lie?” he added.
The defense objected, and the judge had the remark stricken from the record.
“Isn’t it true that the reason that 9mm magazine was at the defendant’s house was because he had a 9mm firearm, a Glock 43 that he used in the shooting … and that was simply the second magazine that he forgot to get rid of?” Lewin asked. “Isn’t that what happened sir?”
“No,” Levin replied.
The defense team said they have one more witness left to call — and then, perhaps, A$AP Rocky will testify. They will then rest their case. Closing arguments are expected to start Thursday morning.