Video After The Jump
LOS ANGELES (AP)— A$AP Rocky dove into the arms of Rihanna Tuesday as a clerk read the not guilty verdict at his trial on 2 felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm.
The Los Angeles courtroom, full of fans of the hip-hop performer and his singing superstar partner, exploded into screaming glee as Rocky leapt from the defense table into the gallery, where Rihanna sat between his mother and sister. They embraced and sobbed.
After a three-week trial, the jury deliberated for just three hours to reach the verdict that spared Rocky, whose legal name is Rakim Mayers, a prison sentence that could have run more than two decades.
“Thank y’all for saving my life,” he told the jurors as they left.
Amid the chaos, it took the clerk a while to read the second not guilty verdict, though it was very unlikely the jury would split on the counts.
“Mr. Mayers, you’re excused,” Judge Mark Arnold said.
On the eve of trial, Rocky turned down a prosecution offer of just six months in jail, along with probation and other conditions, if he would plead guilty to one count.
Insisting on his innocence, Rocky decided to gamble that a jury would feel the same. It paid off. The jurors felt at least that there was reasonable doubt of his guilt.
Prosecutors and their witnesses said that he was beefing with a former friend, A$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.”
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