logo
Tory Lanez Legal Team Calls for Pardon After Prison Stabbing, Claims New Evidence in Shooting Case

Tory Lanez Legal Team Calls for Pardon After Prison Stabbing, Claims New Evidence in Shooting Case

Yahoo14-05-2025
Tory Lanez's legal team called on Governor Gavin Newsom to pardon the rapper or commute his sentence days after he was stabbed in prison this week, while further claiming to have new evidence in the rapper's case over the shooting of Megan Thee Stallion.
Lanez, whose real name is Daystar Peterson, is currently serving a 10-year sentence after he was convicted on three firearm charges over the 2020 shooting, which left Meg, whose real name is Megan Mete, wounded with bullet fragments in her feet. Mete told the court that Peterson had shouted 'dance, bitch' before shooting her. Peterson pleaded not guilty in the trial and is appealing the sentence.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
Pro Sound Effects Library Teams With Musical AI to Create Licensed Training Datasets
Yusuf/Cat Stevens Announces Memoir 'Cat on the Road to Find Out'
Capitol Music Group Launches Nashville Division, Hires Candice Watkins as President
During a press conference held by Peterson's legal team, Unite The People, in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday, the rapper's father, Sunstar Peterson, said his son was airlifted to a hospital Monday to treat his injuries, but that he's healing 'remarkably well' following the 'unprovoked attack.'
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed Peterson was stabbed on Monday morning at 7:20 a.m., further stating that authorities have launched an investigation into the incident. Peterson's reps said he was stabbed 14 times, including seven wounds to the back, four to his torso and two to the back of his head, and that both his lungs had collapsed. Sunstar Peterson said on Wednesday that Peterson was also stabbed under his left cheekbone and that 'his jaw was open.' Peterson is breathing on his own again, Sunstar Peterson said.
Peterson's reps said Newsom should get Peterson released citing the stabbing, noting that 'if he is not 'pardoned and released promptly, he may never get out.' Sunstar Peterson called upon both Newsom and President Trump to take action during his speech. Unite The People said it hadn't contacted the Governor's office beyond making the call during Wednesday's press conference.
Aside from the health update, both Sunstar Peterson and other representatives for Peterson had repeatedly stated that the rapper 'was never given a fair trial,' and claimed that prosecutors manipulated evidence to reach a conviction, specifically calling out former LA County District Attorney George Gascon.
His team claimed to have received new evidence, with Walter Roberts — who Unite The People CEO Caesar McDowell said was the team's lead consultant — stating that a man named Bradley James had approached the organization 'a few months ago' claiming to be the bodyguard of Pete's former friend Kelsey Harris during the trial. Harris was in the car with Peterson and Pete during the incident.
Roberts claimed that the bodyguard had heard a conversation in which Harris said that she fired the gun while Peterson knocked the gun down. James was not among the speakers at the press conference Wednesday. Roberts said the team hasn't gone to current D.A. Nathan Hochman's office about the claims yet.
Pete's attorney Alex Spiro disputed Peterson's team's new claims in a statement to THR. 'Tory Lanez was tried and convicted by a jury of his peers and his case was properly adjudicated through the court system,' Spiro said. 'This is not a political matter — this is a case of a violent assault that was resolved in the court of law.'
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
Most Anticipated Concert Tours of 2025: Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar & SZA, Sabrina Carpenter and More
Hollywood's Most Notable Deaths of 2025
Hollywood's Highest-Profile Harris Endorsements: Taylor Swift, George Clooney, Bruce Springsteen and More
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Billie Eilish Reveals 3D Collaboration With James Cameron Is in the Works
Billie Eilish Reveals 3D Collaboration With James Cameron Is in the Works

Yahoo

time38 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Billie Eilish Reveals 3D Collaboration With James Cameron Is in the Works

Billie Eilish is teasing a new project with James Cameron. During her sold-out night one Manchester concert on Saturday, Eilish revealed she is working on a 3D collaboration with James Cameron (Titanic, the Avatar films, Terminator franchise). More from The Hollywood Reporter Astronomer CEO Andy Byron Resigns After Getting Caught on Coldplay Kiss-Cam Tyler, the Creator Reveals New Album Drops Monday Cash Cobain on Justin Bieber 'Swag' Collaboration: "We Were Just in There Being Free" 'So you may have noticed that there are more cameras than usual in here. Basically, I can't say much about it, but what I can say is that I'm working on something very, very special with somebody named James Cameron, and it's going to be in 3D,' the singer told the crowd. 'So, take that as you will and these four shows here in Manchester, you and me are part of a thing that I am making with him. He's in this audience somewhere, just saying. So don't mind that, and also I'll probably be wearing this exact outfit for like four days in a row.' Details for the project are currently unknown. It's also not been revealed if her brother and longtime collaborator, Finneas, will be involved. The 'Birds of a Feather' singer's past film credits include the 2021 documentary Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry, directed by R.J. Cutler and Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles, the 2021 concert movie. Eilish is currently touring her third album, Hit Me Hard and Soft. As for Cameron, his next film is the highly anticipated Avatar: Fire and Ash, which is slated to release on Dec. 19. The runtime for the film will apparently be longer than The Way of Water, which was more than three hours long. Best of The Hollywood Reporter From 'Party in the U.S.A.' to 'Born in the U.S.A.': 20 of America's Most Patriotic (and Un-Patriotic) Musical Offerings Most Anticipated Concert Tours of 2025: Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar & SZA, Sabrina Carpenter and More Hollywood's Most Notable Deaths of 2025 Solve the daily Crossword

How Hollywood Is Feeding the Frenzy Around the Epstein Files
How Hollywood Is Feeding the Frenzy Around the Epstein Files

Yahoo

time39 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

How Hollywood Is Feeding the Frenzy Around the Epstein Files

What did the president really know about a cushy remote getaway for the private-plane elite? No, not that president and not that conspiracy — I'm talking about Paradise, Dan Fogelman's crackling Hulu drama in which James Marsden plays a commander-in-chief with secret plans to ferry the privileged to a deep-in-the-mountain community when an apocalypse befalls Earth. More from The Hollywood Reporter Trump Files $10 Billion Lawsuit Against News Corp., Rupert Murdoch Over Story on Epstein Ties Epstein, Diddy Prosecutor Maurene Comey Speaks Out After Firing: "Fear Is The Tool of a Tyrant" Trump Reacts to 'Late Show' Ending: "I Absolutely Love That Colbert Got Fired" The show earned a surprise Emmy drama nomination this week, just as some figures on both the right and left were busy resurrecting their favorite real-world thriller: the tangled conspiracy theories surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. Paradise is fiction. The Epstein saga is not. But both feel cut from the same cloth of powerful people and the secrets they keep from us. Hollywood has actually spent decades on exactly this kind of story, chronicling conspiracies at the highest but darkest levels of government, crimes committed by the very people charged with protecting us. From the moment Warren Beatty started hunting around for a Senator-assassination coverup in The Parallax View back in the '70's, we've been subject to a steady parade of buried files, vanishing witnesses and covert programs — and inevitably the lone heroes who root them all out. Mulder and Scully solved those mysteries the FBI didn't want solved on The X-Files, Jason Bourne figured out what Conklin was actually up to at the CIA in The Bourne Identity, and most recently, The Night Agent and Paradise had some very plucky marginal types figure out what's really happening at the White House. So when a story pops up like Epstein, with all its mysterious millions and powerful people in the (sometimes literal) background, with all its legitimately open questions about a suspect with White House connections dying in federal custody, we're primed not just to see a news story — we're primed to see a movie. Without them or even us knowing it, the entertainment industry has been readying us for this story for fifty years. On their own, of course, most of these Hollywood government-coverup tales are harmless and even welcome entertainments, fertilizer for the human imagination. But pour on it the fuel of our polarized politics and algorithmic outrage and watch it explode. A story like Epstein is colliding with personal beliefs and prejudices (it's hard to avoid the anti-elite and at times, frankly, antisemitic undercurrents here), along with Trump's own history of Hollywood-derived conspiracy showmanship on QAnon and Obama birther theory, to detonate in, well, exactly the ways we're seeing now. Hollywood tells these stories by dramatic imperative — dangling that the truth is out there makes for much better storytelling than suggesting those mysterious lights were just illuminating the path of an airplane. So It feels too easy to implicate film and television in this factless frenzy. But it's also a cop-out to exempt them entirely. As the film critic Laura Venning wrote in the journal Curzon last year, while movies like Oliver Stone's JFK feel 'akin to a guilty pleasure' and 'you could certainly question whether there's any harm' to them, a 'decade ago the idea that a former President could instigate an insurrection over patently false claims that an election had been stolen from him would [also] have been unimaginable.' Sometimes Hollywood stories do involve real criminality, as with All the President's Men. More often though they have tilted toward JFK, cozying up just close enough to the truth to make us believe in non-existent cabals. And nothing suggests a cabal like the news story du jour. The Epstein Files is fast-becoming the JFK of our time, only it's playing out not in a lone Oliver Stone weekend movie-theater release but in our pockets and on our laptops, on airport cable-news broadcasts and bar-side phone-scrolling, the appeal of drama lapping the need for verification. A convicted sex offender killed himself in 2019 in federal prison awaiting trial after a whole set of fresh revelations of alleged sex trafficking. That left both a black hole where the alleged perpetrator's testimony would have gone and a juicy mystery left unsolved; if it wasn't a suicide, as the government was saying, who might have wanted Epstein dead? Numerous investigations followed, with many Rolodexes and other material published to sate the beast. All accompanied by tell of elusive 'files' that would supposedly implicate all kinds of powerful people on some mythical list. With so many Internet sources to listen to and publish on, the public had a chance to be the hero of the story, all these hints of Gilbert Joubert Three Days of the Condor supervillainy just begging us to summon our inner Robert Redford to find him out. Thus began the years of theories that Epstein was murdered as part of a conspiracy to conceal the sex crimes of powerful people, fed by noticeable but mostly unremarkable anomalies, like the modification of prison footage. With his opaque history and sources of wealth, his super-powerful friends and his immoral appetites, Epstein became the perfect avatar for our at-home Hollywood heroism. The story also uncommonly played to both sides of the political spectrum, the right's suspicion of government and the left's suspicion of the wealthy — a perfect horseshoe. As producers of The Fugitive and its Big Pharma bogeyman could tell you, a good conspiracy is made even better when it can be aimed at someone or some group already disliked. The Epstein Files became the ideal slate onto which both Democrats and Republicans could each project their supervillain fantasies. Trump himself led the charge. In his first term, he retweeted an outlandish theory that Bill Clinton was involved in Epstein's murder — his and his allies' go-to family secretly behind all kinds of killings (Seth Rich, Vince Foster). Trump at the time said that 'I want a full investigation, and that's what I absolutely am demanding.' J.D. Vance played along, during the campaign last year, saying that it was 'an important thing' to release the list, never mind if it actually existed. But once a MAGA-driven phenomenon, the script has flipped. Democrats are hammering the president on the issue now, trying to rally support in Congress to force Trump to reveal more findings, a push that resonates with an increasingly conspiracy-minded segment of the left and its distrust of legacy media. The story is playing to their favorite supervillain: Trump. (That narrative was fed this week when the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump in 2003 had sent Epstein a birthday card with a lewd drawing that implied the two had a 'secret.') Meanwhile, the president himself has uncharacteristically gone from Mulder to Scully, casting himself as the skeptic in the primetime conspiracy-drama he once created. 'Their [the left's] new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this 'bullshit,' hook, line, and sinker,' the president wrote on Truth Social Wednesday, after telling reporters on Tuesday night 'I don't understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody; it's pretty boring stuff' and after Attorney General Pam Bondi said a few days earlier the investigation was closed. The truth is not out there, and can we please go back to talking about Rosie O'Donnell? One way to view this two-party interest is expediency — each side, at one time or another, believed the other had more figures on whatever list probably doesn't exist. But the dual Democrat-Republican fascination with The Epstein Files also testifies to a truth Hollywood has forever known: a love of conspiracy stories tugs at us all. The Jason Bourne movies sold $800 million-worth of tickets in the U.S., and Democrats and Republicans each bought lots of them. The rise of conspiracy theories is a massively complex topic, with studies suggesting a whole slew of social and technological factors. No batch of fictional movies, no matter how exciting, would directly lead to the rise of any conspiracy theory. But it's easy to see how Hollywood has primed us to be ready to jump on one when it presents itself, especially if it comes at a moment already seeded with huge mistrust of elites and media and, yes, a growing culture of antisemitism. The anti-Jewish codings in all this are hard to avoid, with the longtime ridiculous and hateful caricature of Epstein as a Mossad agent running a blackmail ring for the Israeli government continuing to abide. Last weekend's Elmo hackers demanded an Epstein file release even as they were saying 'Kill All Jews,' among other antisemitic vileness and insanities, such as the idea Trump wasn't releasing the list because Netanyahu told him not to. Conspiracy theories are fun. The real world is monochromatic, straightforward, boring. Occam's Razor doesn't cut very deep. More complex hidden explanations are thrilling. (And, as with periodic events like Watergate or Iran-Contra, real just often enough.) True-crime podcasts and its unofficial streaming spinoff, Only Murders in the Building have long realized this fact and savvily played to it, as have earlier 21st-century TV hits like Search Party and Veronica Mars. Like the people 'seeking answers' on Epstein, these stories flatter their protagonists and the audience: Only the sharp few have the vision to spot what's really going on. And the real-world interest in conspiracy theories provides a feedback loop for Hollywood to make more of these stories see under: Ryan Coogler developing a new X-Files for these jittery 2020s times — which powers and makes these real-world theories even more fun. Of course, fun and true are two entirely different creatures. In recent years, the proliferation of digital content and those invidious algorithms have also personalized the phenomenon, turning us all into active amateur gumshoes, even if the truth we sleuth becomes nonsense like COVID-19 vaccines as government tracking devices and a Hillary Clinton-led sex ring run out of a pizza shop. Why watch Alan Pakula when we can be Alan Pakula? One of the rare recent TV exercises not to indulge conspiracy-theory tropes but deconstruct and criticize them was Netflix's winter limited series Zero Day, in which the British actor Dan Stevens played a villainous YouTuber peddling such theories. Asked how much tech platforms were responsible for these theories compared to politicians or the peddlers themselves, Stevens told THR, 'The system. The system is driving it. Those putting it out, those consuming it, everyone. It's a triangle.' What he left out is that Hollywood may be yet another point on that geometry, with its enjoyable but potentially incept-y ideas of an alternate truth the government doesn't want us to see. To be clear: Hollywood can and should tell conspiracy-theory stories. They're exciting entertainment, and that should always be the industry's first objective. But that doesn't mean they don't influence the culture. Venning, the Curzon critic, was writing her essay on Fly Me to the Moon, last year's Apple film, with another harmless but still potentially insidious idea that a moon landing was shot on a sound stage. Nearly half of all people under the age of 45 now are at least unsure of whether NASA actually landed on the moon, according to a recent University of New Hampshire study, and obviously, school didn't teach them that. In the film, Scarlett Johansson even has the cheeky meta line 'I think we should have gotten Kubrick.' As it happens, Kubrick himself sits at the center of Epstein conspiracy-mongering, with a running Internet theory that the sex-party scene in Eyes Wide Shut was an attempt by the late director to stealthily expose Epstein. You don't want to know. Best of The Hollywood Reporter From 'Party in the U.S.A.' to 'Born in the U.S.A.': 20 of America's Most Patriotic (and Un-Patriotic) Musical Offerings Most Anticipated Concert Tours of 2025: Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar & SZA, Sabrina Carpenter and More Hollywood's Most Notable Deaths of 2025 Solve the daily Crossword

Callum Vinson to play Jason Voorhees in 'Crystal Lake'
Callum Vinson to play Jason Voorhees in 'Crystal Lake'

UPI

time18 hours ago

  • UPI

Callum Vinson to play Jason Voorhees in 'Crystal Lake'

1 of 2 | Callum Vinson -- pictured here with Harriet Sansom Harris (L) and Amanda Seyfried in a scene from "Long Bright River" -- is set to star in the "Friday the 13th" prequel "Crystal Lake." Photo courtesy of Peacock July 19 (UPI) -- Callum Vinson has signed on to play Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th prequel, Crystal Lake. The Hollywood Reporter announced the casting of 10-year-old Callum in the pivotal role for the Peacock series on Friday. The child actor is known for his roles in Poker Face, Coup! Long Bright River and Night Agent. Other additions to the Crystal Lake cast, which will be led by the previously announced Linda Cardellini, include Nick Cordileone, Joy Suprano, Danielle Kotch and Phoenix Parnevik. "Jason. Ralph. Rita. Claudette. Barry. This team slays," show-runner Brad Kane wrote alongside a screenshot of the news report. Friday the 13th, which was about a killer terrorizing camp counselors, opened in 1980 and spawned numerous sequels, remakes, comic books and video games.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store