A year and a half after he was first arrested alongside many of his Young Stoner Life record label affiliates, Young Thug’s court case finally began on Monday (November 27). Though fellow YSL members are facing harsher charges, others earned their freedom with plea deals like Gunna. Thug is only facing one charge at the hands of the Fulton County court: conspiracy to violate Georgia’s racketeering laws.
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This charge stems from the prosecution’s belief that Thug rented a car for YSL affiliates of his that allegedly committed a murder later on while driving the vehicle. They hope to prove this in court and use it as evidence that YSL is not just a music collective, but a street gang.
However, for his particular R.I.C.O. (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) trial, Thug waited behind bars for months as the jury selection stage dragged on. Ultimately, the 12 jurors Fulton County decided on include nine women and three men, all of whom are relatively middle-aged and were not previously familiar with Thug’s music.
Additionally, just before the trial began, the judge overseeing the case, Ural Glanville, ruled that Thug’s rap lyrics could be used as evidence by the prosecution to the dismay of Thug, his legal team, and his millions of supporters.
″They’re targeting the right to free speech,” Thug’s lawyer Brian Steel said of the ruling.
While this was one of the major stories regarding the high-profile R.I.C.O. case going into this week, the first two days of the trial have generated several more headlines.
Judge and Dog
Just before the trial began on Monday, Glanville took his seat at the bench to oversee the case. But to everyone’s surprise, he revealed that he was joined by his dog Jack, and explained that he needed a service animal to assist him.
“Here behind me is this ball that starts jingling,” he explained to the court. “And if you hear a jingling sound like a bell, please don’t think that I’m doing anything creepy up here, alright? I have a service dog behind me. His name is Jack. I think some of you may have seen him already. He lives the best life ever. He’s pampered. He’s a Labrador Retriever and he’s about 2-and-a-half, 3 years old at this point in time.
“If you hear that bell, that’s him moving around. He doesn’t bark. He rarely gets interested in what’s going on, so he might come up here and look, but that’s about it. Don’t bring him any food either, OK? He is spoiled rotten. Please don’t try to throw him any food back here behind me or anything like that. He doesn’t need anything else.”
[RELATED: Young Thug’s Father Confirms There’s No Bad Blood with Gunna]
Opening Statement
For the defense’s opening statement, Steel went in front of the judge and jury and broke down how Thug got tied up in criminal activity at a young age, and why he has always been at odds with law enforcement.
“[Thug] was born into an environment, a community, a society that was filled with oppression, despair, hopelessness and helplessness,” he said. “[He] thinks the entire justice system is corrupt. It should be blown up. And everybody who feeds into that are awful people, stealing lives away from others.”
Thug is a “Studio Gangster”
After opening statements were heard on Monday, the official defense of Young Thug began on Tuesday. To help catch the jury up to speed on the modern rap landscape, and aim to prove why Thug’s song lyrics shouldn’t incriminate him, Steel insisted that his client was nothing more than “a studio gangster.”
“He is not running a criminal enterprise on Cleveland Avenue to gather money and power,” he said. “He is not sitting there telling people to kill people. He doesn’t need their money. He’s worth tens of millions of dollars … These are not confessions. They are not admissions. They are art.”
T.H.U.G. and Pushin’ P
Later in his arguments, Steele tried to explain the meaning behind Thug’s controversial rap name, as well as a song he released alongside Gunna in early 2022 named “Pushin’ P.” First, he emphasized that Thug was not just a representation of a street misfit, but also stood for something much more meaningful.
“T.H.U.G. meant and means to Jeffery something very personal. It was his pact that if he could ever make it as a musical artist and help his family, himself and his many others out of this endless cycle of hopelessness, he would be Truly Humbled Under God. That’s what T.H.U.G. means,” Steel said.
This assertion was actually corroborated by Thug’s sister, who is also an artist and goes by Hi Doorah. Back in December of last year, she tweeted out the meaning of the T.H.U.G. acronym that Steel defined for the court.
Then, on the topic of “Pushin’ P,” which the prosecution tried to interpret as gang terminology, Steel instead claimed that the song had no derogatory or harmful meaning, and instead was popularizing a phrase that was well-intentioned.
“There’s nothing wrong with holding up a Bloods sign, but that’s not a Bloods sign. … That is a P,” he told the jury. “Jeffery’s fingers are down. And what you’ll learn is that Jeffery just released with Sergio Kitchens, a performer known as Gunna, a song that is wildly popular around the globe. It’s called ‘Pushin P’ and it’s positivity. It means any circumstance you’re in, if you think positively about something, you can make it through. You’re pushing positivity.”
Photo by Andrew Toth/Getty Images for Perrier-Jouët
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