A$AP Rocky’s Fate in Hands of Jury After Lawyers Clash in Court
Jurors were escorted to their deliberation room late Friday in the firearm assault trial of A$AP Rocky, the Grammy-nominated rapper accused of brandishing a gun and firing at his former friend on a street corner in Hollywood three years ago.
“The case is now yours,” Los Angeles County Judge Mark. S Arnold said, telling jurors they could drop off their notes and leave for the holiday weekend. He said deliberations would begin in earnest Tuesday.
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The jury of seven women and five men received the case after spending the day hearing two days of final summations from each side. In his final comments, lead defense lawyer Joe Tacopina branded alleged victim A$AP Relli, born Terell Ephron, a “pathological liar, perjurer, and an extortionist.”
“This is Rocky’s one day in court. By your decision, you control his very life in your hands. Treat it fairly, be fair, do the right thing. Remember the testimony of Terrell Ephron and ask yourselves if you would entrust him with any matter of importance in your life. And if the answer is no, you can’t trust him in this matter,” Tacopina said. “The case rises and falls with him.”
Rocky, born Rakim Mayers, is fighting two charges of assault with a semiautomatic firearm. If convicted as charged, he’s facing up to 24 years in prison, though prosecutors have said they’d ask for half that amount. During the four-week trial that started Jan. 24, Ephron claimed Mayers lured him to an armed ambush across the street from the W Hollywood hotel on Nov. 6, 2021, flanked by two other members of the men’s creative collective A$AP Mob: A$AP Illz, born Illijah Ulanger; and A$AP Twelvyy, born Jamel Phillips. Ephron said Mayers grabbed him first outside a garage, pulled out a gun, threatened to kill him, walked around the block, pulled the gun out again, and fired two shots, grazing him with a 9 mm bullet on his left hand.
Mayers, 36, claims the firearm in his hand that night was a prop gun, only capable of firing blanks. Through testimony from Phillips and a tour manager, Lou Levin, jurors heard the prop gun was procured from the set of the “D.M.B” music video Mayers shot with Rihanna in July 2021. Levin said after the incident with Ephron, he personally returned the prop gun to the co-director of the video.
Prosecutors got the last word Friday. In a final rebuttal, Deputy District Attorney John Lewin said the case was a simple one. With Mayers’ partner Rihanna watching from the front row, Lewin repeatedly gestured toward Mayers. “That man decided that his ego and his vendetta and his anger at Relli was important enough that he was going to risk not only Relli’s life or Illz’s life, but he was going to fire two shots from a 9 mm firearm in middle of Hollywood,” he said. “That man decided, ‘You know what? I’m angry, and I’m going to show him.’”
Lewin said it would be “misconduct” if jurors got into the deliberation room and acquitted Mayers out of concern for what might happen to his family. “You are not allowed to consider how this might affect Rihanna or his kids,” he said. “You’re here to call balls and strikes. What happens to Rocky is not your responsibility whatsoever.” He said the couple’s two toddler sons may have been “adorable” when they appeared in court for a short time on Thursday, but it didn’t matter. (After a break, Judge Arnold ruled Lewin was barred from mentioning anything about Rihanna or the children’s appearances in court.)
During his lengthy summation Friday, Tacopina repeatedly accused Ephron of fabricating or destroying evidence, lying to police, and committing perjury on the witness stand. He said when Ephron handed his phone over to police for the investigation, it appeared the first time he and Mayers communicated the day of the alleged shooting was when Mayers texted Ephron three messages shortly before they met up that read, “WYA? / Let’s get to it / Stop ducking my calls.”
Tacopina reminded jurors that during cross-examination, he confronted Ephron with four messages Ephron sent to Mayers around 10:30 a.m. the morning of the incident. “You got all these fake animosity toward me lol beat me up / N—- I wish you would / Give me a reason n—- / U been pussy,” Ephron wrote in the chain flashed on a courtroom screen.
“Relli made clear he wanted a reason to fight Rocky,” Tacopina argued Friday. “Their witness lied to them. He lied to the police and deleted messages. He destroyed evidence in this case.” Tacopina said that when asked about the recovered messages on the witness stand, Ephron called them “fake.” During his testimony, Ephron ultimately admitted he sent the texts to Mayers. He claimed he deleted them the morning of the alleged shooting, well before he handed his phone to police, because he felt betrayed.
Tacopina then focused on a text message Ephron sent to a friend on Oct. 16, three weeks before the alleged shooting, in which he expressed anger over his mistaken belief Mayers had reneged on a promise to cover funeral expenses for a friend. “If rocky don’t do shit for this boy / funeral ima beat that n—- up,” the texts read. Tacopina said the chain supported the defense position Ephron was clearly spoiling for a fight the night of the incident. He called it “offensive” that Ephron first denied writing the texts and then later, after conceding he did, said they meant “nothing.”
“That’s perjury,” Tacopina said. “That’s a crime by the way, perjury. … His oath to tell the truth means nothing to that man, absolutely nothing.”
Tacopina said other than Ephron’s word, there was no evidence to back up Ephron’s claim that the day before the incident, he was riding in a car with A$AP Bari, born Jabari Shelton, when he allegedly overheard Mayers say through the phone that he wanted to beat Ephron up. The lawyer asked why prosecutors didn’t bring Shelton in to corroborate the claim. He then showed a text Ephron allegedly sent to Mayers on Sept. 18, 2021 that read, “Fuck everything about you fake ass n—- I dead hate u.”
The lawyer also highlighted a text Mayers sent to Ephron two hours after the incident, after Ephron sent Mayers’ manager more than a dozen texts claiming Mayers shot at him. “Now u trynna extort [me], talkin bout i shot at u n shot u 4 times and all type of nonsense u a phony and u don’t have the best intentions, stop texting me,” Mayers texted at 12:46 a.m. on Nov. 7, 2021. “Stop calling my manager and call police if I ‘shot’ @ u u weirdo.”
Tacopina said the text exonerated his client. “What kind of person tells someone to go to police if they know they committed a crime?” he asked rhetorically.
The attorney said Ephron lied “over and over” on the stand and couldn’t be trusted. He then played a recording of a call between Ephron and a website designer from 2022 in which Ephron said, “I’m suing the shit out of him, that was my game regardless. I don’t give a fuck about no police.” Tacopina called it textbook extortion.
In prosecutors’ initial closing argument Thursday, Deputy District Attorney Paul Przelomiec acknowledged Ephron was seeking money though a $30 million civil lawsuit. After the alleged shooting, “Mr. Ephron was absolutely focused on himself,” he said. It didn’t matter, he argued. “The only question that you are here to answer is: That night in Hollywood, did Mr. Mayers have a real gun or a fake gun,” he said.
On Thursday, Tacopina focused much of the first half of his summation on a trip Ephron took to a Los Angeles gun range on Oct. 19, 2021, two weeks before the incident. He urged jurors to remember Ephron at first denied ever shooting a 9 mm gun before the run-in with Mayers and then, when confronted with video found on his phone showing him at a range on Oct. 19, claimed the venue was likely in New Jersey, but definitely not Los Angeles. Three days later, Ephron returned to the witness stand and said he did some “homework” over the weekend and determined the range was actually the Los Angeles Gun Club. Tacopina argued Thursday that Ephron was forced into the about-face because a Twitter user posted an interior photo of the Los Angeles Gun Club that appeared “identical” to the Ephron video. Tacopina said Ephron “blatantly lied” about his access to spent 9 mm shell casings before the incident, calling his testimony on the subject “a perjury mini-series.”
“Remember how that all played out here when considering his credibility,” Tacopina said. “There’d be no reason to lie about that unless he had to cover up something.”
For his part, Lewin scoffed at the suggestion Ephron saved casings from the gun range. “The idea that Relli is somehow Nostradamus?” he asked with a laugh. “He’s carrying around 9 mm casings just in case the defendant assaults him? It’s absurd.”
Lewin said Ephron’s “inconsistencies” and combative demeanor on the stand were irrelevant. “Relli, in a lot of ways, was a very problematic victim. He’s not very sympathetic. I’m not here to get you to like Relli, to get you to say Relli deserves $30 million,” Lewin argued. “They have put Relli on trial in this case because in the end, he is a very convenient target. Legally it doesn’t work.”
At one point during the day, with the jury on a break, Lewin and Tacopina traded personal insults. Lewin accused Tacopina of being “unethical” when he argued prosecutors had “accepted” Ephron’s alleged perjury. Tacopina blasted back: “He literally asked for a stipulation in front of a jury that he knew was not true or didn’t know if it was true. That’s unethical!” The dispute devolved into ad hominem attacks from there, leading Judge Arnold to yell, “Stop it!” as deputies cleared the courtroom.
The closing arguments followed an 11-day trial spread across four weeks in which prosecutors presented lengthy testimony from Ephron along with a woman who watched the incident from a seventh-floor balcony and four investigators from the Los Angeles Police Department. Mayers declined to testify in his own defense. His star witness was Phillips. Over two days on the witness stand, Phillips told jurors both he and Ephron knew the gun was a prop. He said when the alleged prop gun first appeared, Ephron taunted Mayers, “Shoot that fake-ass gun.”
Under oath, Phillips testified that Ephron was the initial aggressor when they all met up outside the hotel. He said Mayers tried to walk away, but Ephron pursued them. Phillips said Ephron physically attacked Ulanger once they reached the corner of Selma Ave. and Vista Del Mar Ave., leading Mayers to fire two blanks as “warning shots” to scare him off.
Both sides have claimed the blurry surveillance video of the alleged shooting supports their rendition of events. It was recorded with no sound, but prosecutors synchronized it with the sound of two loud pops recorded from a different camera around the corner. Mayers’ lawyers used the same methodology to come up with their own synchronization. In the prosecution’s version, the first pop comes just before Ephron tangles with Ulanger. In the defense version, the first pop comes after Ephron is seen in contact with Ulanger, supporting the claim Mayers fired to defend Ulanger. The judge allowed both videos to be admitted, leaving jurors with the task of determining which made more sense.
On Tuesday, Judge Mark S. Arnold told jurors for the first time that they could consider a secondary basis to acquit Mayers if they simply don’t accept that he was carrying a prop gun. The judge said if jurors determine Mayers “reasonably believed” that he or one of friends with him that night were in “imminent danger” of suffering bodily injury — and that a reasonable amount of force was necessary to defend against that danger — they could find Mayers not guilty on the basis of self-defense.
Before the case went to the jury Friday, Lewin urged the panel to set Mayers’ fame aside when reaching their verdict. “He needs to be treated like you would treat any other person,” Lewin said. “In the end, that’s all he’s entitled to. He doesn’t get to be the big celebrity in a jury trial. he’s a defendant like anybody else.”
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