Jurors handed hip-hop producer Metro Boomin a decisive win at his civil sexual-assault trial in Los Angeles on Thursday.
After only about an hour of deliberation, the panel of five men and three women unanimously found that plaintiff Vanessa LeMaistre had failed to prove her claims that the influential musician, born Leland T. Wayne, had raped her at a Southern California hotel in 2016. Wayne was found not liable on all four causes of action.
“I’m blessed. I’m relieved,” Wayne told Rolling Stone as he exited the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. “I never thought I would ever have to do anything like that. I’m just relieved. It’s a burden lifted off my back. I’ll just get back to my family and continue to do the great things that I strive to do.”
LeMaistre declined to comment, but her lead lawyer, Michael J. Willemin, said she will continue pursuing her pending mistrial motions “based on various errors and the admission of certain evidence and the exclusion of certain evidence” during the trial. “We’ll be pursuing both of those motions for a mistrial and eventually an appeal. This is far from the end of this case,” Willemin said.
“The evidence wasn’t there,” a male juror said as he left the courthouse. “A lot of it was just testimony or talking about it. There was no substantial ‘This is what happened.’ There were no dates recollected correctly.… She didn’t remember a lot. That was also the issue.”
In her lawsuit filed last October, LeMaistre alleged that she “blacked out” after ingesting some Xanax and drinking alcohol given to her by Wayne at a recording-studio session. She claimed she later woke up in a strange hotel room and was drifting in and out of consciousness as Wayne was having sex with her.
On the witness stand, Wayne vehemently denied the allegations, saying there was “no way in the world” he assaulted LeMaistre. He said the sex was consensual, and the first time he heard LeMaistre was accusing him of anything was when she brought her lawsuit nine years later.
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“This whole lawsuit was born out of a drug den in Peru. In the jungle,” Wayne’s defense lawyer, Justin H. Sanders, said in his closing argument. “This case is preposterous.”
During the three-day trial, jurors saw a handwritten note that LeMaistre wrote during a 2024 trip to Peru, where she engaged in an extended “Ayahuasca ceremony,” a spiritual ritual involving the ingestion of a psychoactive plant used by indigenous cultures in the Amazon. Titled “Plan Ayahuasca Gave Me,” LeMaistre wrote that she intended to “blow the whistle on Metro Boomin” and publish her “date rape” allegations in a post on social media. “We’re asking for 3.4 million to 3.7 million,” she wrote in her sometimes admittedly illegible handwriting. “P.S. I am a medium.”
Sanders said the notes from Peru were “disturbing” and not credible. “She talks to dead people in her mind,” he argued.
In his own closing argument, Willemin said his client is the daughter of Haitian immigrants who has suffered “an ungodly amount of trauma in her life.” He said shortly before she met Wayne, she lost her nine-month-old son. She was grieving and not interested in a sexual relationship when she visited Wayne at the studio that night, he said.
“She has beliefs that I don’t have, maybe people in this court don’t have. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t sexually assaulted,” Willemin said. “Some of those beliefs are less than traditional, maybe hard to understand. But the question is, when she [testified], did you believe her? Because if you did, [everything else] is just noise.”
LeMaistre testified over two days on Tuesday and Wednesday. She was the only witness called by her side. The writer and self-described “shaman,” who was 30 when she first met a 22-year-old Wayne in Las Vegas in 2016, testified that she spoke about the alleged assault with a mental-health professional she was seeing at a treatment center called Prototypes in the fall of 2016. She later discussed it with professionals again when she called a pair of rape hotlines in 2024, she told jurors.
“Having lost my son, and the defendant assaulting me, have been the two, by far, worst things I’ve ever experienced in my life. It has been excruciatingly painful,” LeMaistre testified. “This stole the past nine years of my life. I haven’t been able to have any healthy relationships. I want to get married one day.”
Once LeMaistre rested her case, Wayne testified in his own defense, taking the stand as his fellow Atlanta artist Young Thug watched from the gallery. “I’m just here to support him,” Young Thug told Rolling Stone as he walked into the courthouse Wednesday. “He’s a longtime friend.”
Wayne, 32, told jurors that he found it “preposterous” that LeMaistre had accused him of raping her without a condom. He testified that they actually had sexual relations on two occasions, and that she clearly consented both times.
“I really don’t know where to start. This is crazy. I can’t even believe I’m up here doing this right now,” he said of his testimony. “For her to accuse me of something like this, it’s something I could never fathom. I can’t even say what I think should happen to people who rape people.” Wayne testified that he lost his mother to domestic abuse and believes sexual abusers “should be tortured and killed.”
During a fierce cross-examination by Sanders, LeMaistre defended her handwritten notes. Asked where she got the $3.4 million to $3.7 million range that she described, she said those were the numbers “given to me” during the Ayahuasca ceremony.
With eight jurors listening intently, LeMaistre said that when she first heard the Wayne-produced song “Rap Saved Me” in 2017, she believed the lyrics were about her. In the chorus, artists 21 Savage and Offset rap, “She took a Xanny, then she fainted. I’m from the gutter, ain’t no changing. From the gutter, rap saved me. She drive me crazy, have my baby.”
In his closing argument, LeMaistre’s lawyer said it was “far too big a coincidence that a song produced by [Wayne] literally recounted what happened the night of the sexual assault.” But in his sworn testimony, Wayne told jurors that he didn’t pen the lyrics or even suggest them to his collaborators.
Sanders urged the jurors to consider the evidence. He focused on the fact that LeMaistre was the only witness for her case. “No single person has been brought into this case to support her allegations,” Sanders said. “Where are all the therapists she claims she told this to? Was that ever explained to you?”
He then focused on LeMaistre’s medical records from 2016, after the disputed hotel encounter with Wayne. The Planned Parenthood records said LeMaistre had denied experiencing any instances of “coercion.” Later, on Feb. 10, 2025, LeMaistre asked Planned Parenthood to “amend” the records and remove her “denial of coercion.” “This is called trying to pull a fast one,” Sanders argued Thursday in his closing. “In this case, Ms. LeMaistre is lying about everything. … She did not prove her case.”
After hugging his lawyers in the courtroom, Wayne told Rolling Stone he was grateful Young Thug showed up to support him on Wednesday. “It meant a lot. He’s a close friend of mine. He’s my brother. I was there for his trial, he was there for mine,” he said.
From Rolling Stone US
