Daystar Peterson has a lot to say about his 10-year prison sentence handed down Tuesday in the 2020 shooting of fellow rapper Megan Thee Stallion, and none of it seems especially repentant. "I refuse to apologize for something that I did not do," Peterson, aka Tory Lanez, wrote in a Thursday message on Instagram, adding he "always will" insist on his innocence. The defiant 31-year-old went to say that "this is nothing but another moment where my back is against the wall and I refuse to stop fighting till I come out victorious."
Without going into detail, Lanez noted in his statement that "this week in court I took responsibility for all verbal and intimate moments that I shared with the parties involved ... that's it." What he also said in court Tuesday involved his young child, whom he mentioned before Judge David Herriford in a plea for leniency. "I'm standing in front of you as a father to a 6-year-old who needs me every step of the way," Lanez said, per Rolling Stone. "There's been this misconception about me being this monster, not having remorse—that's just not true."
He went on to tell Herriford that "everyone was drunk" the night he shot his "friend," whose real name is Megan Pete. "I said things I shouldn't have said," he lamented. Lanez said he still cared for Pete—"We both lost mothers, we'd sit there and drink until we felt numb"—and conceded that "everything I did wrong that night I take responsibility for." Outside the Los Angeles court Tuesday, Lanez's attorney, Jose Baez, said his client was "incredibly remorseful and ashamed and embarrassed," per the BBC. "As far as his actions are concerned, he has been nothing but apologetic."
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That accountability and remorse apparently don't involve the specific charges against him, however, which he said in his Instagram post he was "wrongfully convicted of." He was found guilty in December of first-degree assault with a firearm, discharge of a firearm with gross negligence, and having a concealed firearm in a vehicle. "I have never let a hard time intimidate me," Lanez wrote in his statement. "I've faced adversity my whole life and every time it looked like I would lose, I came out on top." He then added: "Tough times don't last, tough people do." (More Megan Thee Stallion stories.)
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