Rape

Hip-hop producer Metro Boomin told jurors at his civil rape case on Wednesday that he had two consensual encounters with his accuser in 2016, always wore a condom, and couldn’t wait for his trial to start so he could testify and give his side.

“Were you wrongly accused?” his lawyer, Lawrence Hinkle, asked inside a federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles.

“Absolutely. I’ve been thinking about this day for a year,” the producer, whose legal name is Leland T. Wayne, told the jury. The influential producer, songwriter, and DJ said he found it “preposterous” that plaintiff Vanessa LeMaistre had accused him of raping her in a hotel without a condom in 2016 after handing her a drink that allegedly caused her to “black out.”

“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. “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.”

Asked point-blank if he ever sexually assaulted LeMaistre, he said, “Absolutely not.” Asked again minutes later, he said, “No way in the world.”

Wayne, 32, took the witness stand as his friend and fellow Atlanta-based artist Young Thug watched in the courtroom gallery. “I’m just here to support him,” Young Thug told Rolling Stone as he walked into the courthouse during the lunch break. “He’s a longtime friend.”

Earlier on Wednesday, LeMaistre finished her own testimony in the case, telling jurors she was still reeling from the recent loss of her newborn son in 2016 when she visited Wayne at a Los Angeles recording studio after ingesting half of a Xanax. She said Wayne handed her a shot that she sipped shortly before she passed out. LeMaistre said she later found herself drifting in and out of consciousness in a hotel room with Wayne on top of her, penetrating her vaginally and then performing oral sex on her. When she finally woke up completely hours later, Wayne allegedly ushered her out of a side door and pointed her to a car that returned her to the studio to retrieve her car, she testified.

“I was confused,” she told jurors of her immediate reaction. She said she didn’t go to the police right away or confront Wayne because she was still processing what happened. “It was very foggy for me waking up the next day,” she explained.

LeMaistre, who was 30 when she first met a 22-year-old Wayne in Las Vegas earlier that year, 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 said.

“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 said on the witness stand. “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.”

During a fierce cross-examination by Wayne’s other lawyer, Justin H. Sanders, LeMaistre defended a series of handwritten notes she wrote that were turned over to the defense in discovery. In journal entries dated June 14, 2017, LeMaistre used two different pen colors as she authored what appeared to be a conversation with someone named “Chrisie.” “All of it was me just self-soothing,” she testified.

“When should I hit back Metro?” she wrote in the journal. “Will I sleep with him again?” Then switching to Chrisie’s voice, she wrote, “Yes, and it will be beautiful, great, amazing.” Asked what she meant by “again,” LeMaistre said “technically” she already had slept with Wayne, but “the conditions were rape.”

Sanders then turned to notes 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. In the notes titled “Plan Ayahuasca Gave Me,” LeMaistre wrote that she intended to “blow the whistle on Metro Boomin.” She also wrote that she planned to contact the law firm that singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura used to sue music mogul Sean Combs, and further planned to 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.

“That was the number given to me,” Le Maistre testified about the amounts. Asked if she meant that the numbers were “given” to her during the Ayahuasca ceremony, she said, “Correct.”

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.”

LeMaistre also testified that she found out she was pregnant after visiting a Planned Parenthood in late 2016. As Sanders walked her through her medical records from Planned Parenthood, he showed jurors forms listed her last menstrual cycle had been on Oct. 1, 2016, and her “most recent unprotected sexual intercourse” as having been on Oct. 13, 2016. She denied experiencing any instances of “coercion” or intimate partner violence, the medical records said. Another record dated Nov. 7, 2016, said the gestational age of the fetus was five weeks and two days. LeMaistre, who had a non-surgical abortion to end the pregnancy, later contacted Planned Parenthood on Feb. 10, 2025, asking to amend the reported dates in her records and remove her “denial of coercion.”

“You knew when you tried to change those records that it was the only way you could make your story stick,” Sanders challenged LeMaistre. “You had to change the dates of the last unprotected sex, correct?” Sanders asked. LeMaistre denied the allegation. Sanders appeared to be suggesting that LeMaistre wanted to link her pregnancy to Wayne because it would support her claims that Wayne had unprotected sex with her and a reason to allegedly pen the lyrics “have my baby.”

In his own testimony, Wayne said he “never” has sex without a condom because he’s not ready to be a father. “Even at that time, my high school sweetheart and I were still using condoms. There was no way this girl I just met in Las Vegas, that I had unprotected sex with her,” he testified.

Asked if there was any truth to the allegation he personally authored or even “suggested” the cited lyrics in “Rap Saved Me,” Wayne replied, “None whatsoever. I just made the beat.”

While LeMaistre was the sole witness for her entire case, Wayne called a clinical psychologist to the stand to testify about her assessment of the plaintiff. Dr. April Thames, chief psychologist at UCLA’s Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, told jurors that she reviewed LeMaistre’s medical records and conducted her own 90-minute to two-hour exam with the plaintiff. She said she personally diagnosed LeMaistre with “borderline personality disorder with psychotic features.” Under cross-examination, she admitted that LeMaistre had not formally received that diagnosis before, though she previously had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder.

Both sides rested their cases on Wednesday afternoon. Closing arguments are set for Thursday.