A$AP Rocky’s criminal trial over charges he opened fire on his former friend A$AP Relli was pushed from mid-November to late January on Tuesday, shielding the musician’s previously announced headlining gig at Rolling Loud Thailand.
A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge agreed to move the expected 10-day trial to Jan. 21, 2025, from its previously scheduled Nov. 12 start date after the rapper’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina, asked for the delay, citing the musician’s travel commitment, the Thanksgiving holiday and a pending issue with evidence. The delay was confirmed after Deputy District Attorney Paul Przelomiec asked for a recess and returned to say Relli “tentatively” accepted the new date during a phone call.
“Do you expect the mother of his children is going to be here?” Judge Mark S. Arnold asked Tacopina, referring to Rihanna. The judge already had ordered that Rocky, born Rakim Mayers, must attend jury selection and each day of the trial even though he’s out on bond and given his lawyers’ permission to appear on his behalf. Tacopina said he wasn’t sure if Rihanna, who shares two young sons with Mayers, would be making any courtroom cameos. “Can you find out if she’s going to attend every day, no days, some days?” the judge asked, apparently concerned about possible security measures.
“I don’t know that at this point…I can almost guarantee you it’s not going to be every day,” Tacopina responded. He cited the couple’s children, ages two and one, as a potential barrier to her attendance. “If she wants to come, she’s welcome to come. If she can’t come, that’s fine,” Judge Arnold said.
After the hearing, Tacopina said Mayers knew he might have to scrap his trip to Thailand, including the Nov. 22 Rolling Loud headlining spot, if the judge refused to change the trial date. “He’s eager to get to this trial as quickly as possible. Having this hanging over his head is not something he wants,” Tacopina told Rolling Stone as he left the courtroom. “If the judge said no, we would have been here on the 12th.” He said he was grateful the judge was “accommodating” to the “real-life circumstance” of his client’s profession.
“I’m confident, knowing the evidence, that he will be vindicated,” Tacopina continued outside the courthouse. “He’s ready to face this head on, and he’ll be okay when this is all said and done.” The lawyer said any decision about Rihanna’s attendance was “not my call.”
“It’s a family decision they have to make. She obviously is a very well-known, very important person. She also has two young children that I think she wants to shield from all this, and she takes care of,” he added. “Obviously she has a lot of professional obligations of her own. I can tell you she loves and supports him, that’s without question. I’ve seen that live and in color.” He said he appreciated Judge Arnold making it clear he would “accommodate” Rihanna’s possible attendance. “It was nice that he went out of his way to welcome her. It just shows the kind of person he is,” Tacopina said.
Mayers, 36, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm. If convicted as charged, he faces up to 24 years in prison. At a preliminary hearing last November, prosecutors showed video of the alleged Nov. 6, 2021 gun assault, claiming Mayers fired a weapon at the corner of Selma Ave. and Vista Del Mar Ave. in Hollywood after confronting Relli, born Terell Ephron, near a parking garage about a block away.
Surveillance footage from the parking garage captured the start of the altercation, prosecutors said. It showed Mayers and Ephron involved in a physical struggle. According to prosecutors, separate grainy video shot by a different building’s security system a block away shows the moment Mayers allegedly discharged a weapon. The video is difficult to make out, a police witness acknowledged. There is no obvious muzzle flash and no sound, only figures appearing to scatter at the same time. Surveillance clips recovered from other nearby buildings captured loud noises and then a man identified by prosecutors as Mayers rounding a corner and slowing down to a walk. Prosecutors claim the loud cracks were the alleged shots.
An LAPD detective testified last November that the video from the parking garage showed Mayers with a gun in his hands. Under cross examination, Det. Frank Flores testified that no weapons were ever recovered in the case. The detective said the video of the alleged shooting was inconclusive because “(There’s) nothing clear that shows it,” meaning the purported gunfire. The detective claimed that “collectively,” the videos tell a plausible story, but Tacopina pushed back. “I’m not asking for opinion,” Tacopina interrupted, asking again if the video showed a shooting. “Nothing definitively shows,” the detective answered.
“The court agrees with the defense that you don’t see an actual shooting on the video. Later, in another section of video, you do hear two shots,” Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge M.L. Villar said last November as she found probable cause to send the case to trial. Judge Villar said she believed “tempers were heightened on both sides” during the incident. In addition to the video evidence, the judge said she considered the extensive testimony by Relli regarding the alleged shooting and his belief he was grazed by a bullet on his left hand. “In any event, Mr. Ephron does what appears to be a dance around the other individuals to avoid being shot. His testimony is that he was shot,” Judge Villar said.
Tacopina – an aggressive defense lawyer known for representing high-profile clients including Meek Mill, YG, and Donald Trump – has suggested Relli perjured himself when he denied during his testimony that he asked for millions of dollars to make the criminal case disappear. “He swore under oath (that) no, he did not. That’s not going to bode well for him at trial,” Tacopina said last year.
In his full day of testimony last November, Ephron claimed he was the victim of an armed ambush orchestrated by the Grammy-nominated “Praise The Lord” rapper. Ephron testified that he sent Mayers an embittered text on Oct. 28, 2021, days before the alleged shooting, because he believed Mayers had become “big-headed” and failed to deliver on a promise to pay funeral expenses for one of their friends. “You so fucking fake it’s sad,” the text shown to the judge read. Mayers never responded, he testified. (Under cross-examination, Ephron said he eventually learned Mayers paid for the entire funeral.)
Ephron told the court he was the one who brought Mayers into the A$AP fold when they were high school students in New York. According to Ephron, Mayers reached out to him directly the night of the alleged assault and set up the face-to-face meeting. Ephron testified that Mayers pulled out a firearm during their initial confrontation and threatened, “I’ll kill you right now.” Ephron said he dared Mayers to follow through. “Shoot that shit. Why you brought a gun if you’re not going to use it? You don’t scare me,” Ephron allegedly told Mayers. He claimed Mayers eventually turned around and fired an initial shot that “grazed” his hand about a block away. He said Mayers fired two or three more times before fleeing the scene. He said he returned later that night and found two 9mm shell casings that he photographed and gave to police.
Mayers also is fighting a lawsuit brought by Ephron alleging assault, battery, negligence, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. As first reported by Rolling Stone, the civil complaint filed in August 2022 unmasked Ephron as the alleged victim in the shooting investigation that led to Mayers’ arrest in April 2022.
Tacopina previously told Rolling Stone that his client was the victim of a failed shakedown. “Rocky didn’t shoot him by any stretch,” Tacopina said, calling the assault allegation a “false scenario” at the heart of “a plain and blatant classic attempt at extortion.” The lawyer said Ephron had been badgering Mayers for money and initiated a physical altercation at the meeting in question.
“He’s a failed associate — ex-associate — of Rocky’s, and he’s jealous,” Tacopina said of Ephron. “He was trying to get money from Rocky. He wanted Rocky to support him. He made it clear. There were repeated attempts where he tried to ask for money in lieu of not causing problems for Rocky. That’s what he said. We have all this memorialized in text messages and otherwise, so it’s an extortion.”
Ephron’s former civil lawyers Jamal Tooson and Brian Hurwitz previously told Rolling Stone that the case against Mayers was “thoroughly investigated by both law enforcement and the Los Angeles District Attorney prior to the decision to not only arrest A$AP Rocky but charge him.” Ephron’s new lawyer on the civil case, Camille Vasquez, is the attorney who represented Johnny Depp in his defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard. Vasquez and Ephron went on to file a second civil complaint against Mayers that alleges he and Tacopina defamed Ephron with the extortion allegation.
At the hearing in the criminal case Tuesday, Judge Arnold said he planned to instruct potential jurors that Mayers’ celebrity should not affect the trial. “I will talk about how no one is entitled to anything, or should be punished, for their status, whether they’re rich or poor or famous or not famous,” Judge Arnold said. “The law applies to everybody in the exact same way, so the fact that Mr. Mayers is a celebrity is not going to inure to his detriment, and it’s not going to inure to his detriment. He’s going to be treated like anybody else.”
From Rolling Stone US
