A$AP Rocky Posed With A Revolver-Themed Accessory At The Met Gala Less Than Three Months After He Was Cleared Of Gun Charges, And People Have Thoughts
In case you missed it, the 2025 Met Gala took place last night, and rapper A$AP Rocky was co-chair alongside Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, Pharrell Williams, and honorary chair LeBron James.
And it's fair to say that it was a pretty strong night for Rocky, with the star hitting the headlines when his girlfriend, Rihanna, confirmed that she is pregnant with their third child ahead of the iconic red carpet.
In addition, Rocky was undeniably among the best dressed of the night, with the star exceptionally on-theme in a custom design from his own creative agency, AWGE. He expertly mixed sportswear with the Black dandy inspiration behind the dress code, with Rocky also telling Vogue that he sought inspiration from his Harlem youth when executing the look.
However, there is one part of the artist's Met Gala outfit that has divided people, with some social media users left unimpressed when they noted that Rocky had accessorized with an umbrella that has a revolver handle after recently being cleared of gun-related assault allegations in court.
If you need reminding, in February, the star was found not guilty on two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm. He had been accused of shooting his former friend A$AP Relli, real name Terell Ephron, during an altercation in 2021.
Pool / Getty Images
The Los Angeles County trial lasted for three weeks, and Rocky — real name Rakim Mayers — could have faced 24 years in prison if found guilty, but prosecutors only sought eight years.
At the time, prosecutors alleged that Rocky pulled a semiautomatic pistol from his waistband and pointed it at Relli as he said: 'I'm going to kill you.' The two had apparently met up close to a Hollywood hotel to settle a dispute, and Relli alleged that Rocky fired in his direction twice — claiming that one of the bullets grazed his hands.
However, Rocky's defense argued that the weapon allegedly used in the shooting was just a 'prop gun,' or a starter pistol, not a real firearm. The 'fake gun' proved to be a key part of the trial, with witnesses testifying that Rocky did not carry a real weapon, but had the prop gun when he did not have security with him. It was claimed that Rocky fired the prop gun to stop Relli from attacking one of their friends.
Rocky was found not guilty by the jury, and famously leaped over the stand to hug Rihanna in court when the verdict was announced.
Still, some found Rocky's inclusion of a gun in his Met Gala look less than three months later to be in bad taste, with a viral tweet reading: 'A revolver handle umbrella after beating a gun case is diabolical.'
At the time of writing, this tweet has been seen more than five million times and has hundreds of thousands of likes, retweets, and replies.
'This gun-handled umbrella is such a bold, dangerous statement to make after beating his case,' another popular tweet echoes.
'does rocky, a man accused of shooting someone, have a bedazzled GUN?' somebody else asked, while one more wrote: 'A pistol handle umbrella. This man is crazy.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
35 minutes ago
- Yahoo
I Was Undocumented for 21 Years. This Is Why I Tell My Story
Credit - Getty Images For 21 years, I was undocumented. While I am an American citizen now, this fact still remains the boldest and most dangerous thing I can say out loud. The danger of being undocumented, of course—greatly heightened by President Donald Trump's administration—is of deportation. When my family entered this country, my parents warned me of the possible consequences. 'If you tell anyone you're illegal, they'll report you to Homeland Security,' they'd say. I was four years old. There's an existential power that deportation holds over the undocumented community. It is another form of death, never to see your loved ones again from home. That's how it felt for me—too young to remember my birth country of Brazil. It's no wonder The Wonderful Wizard of Oz transfixed me as the first book in English I stayed up late to read; it made an image of what deportation might be like: a sudden and violent transport to an unknown realm (or so I'd been told about Brazil, compared to Queens, N.Y., since I could barely remember it when parents came to America) where one's only mission is to return home. Though I claimed no citizenship in the U.S. at the time, I found citizenship in literature. Literature is an easy place to make a home, and my schoolteachers and librarians invited me out of Oz and onto the American prairie, the English drawing room, and to poetry. They directed me toward Homer, Emily Dickinson, and Audre Lorde. They assigned writing, too; for poetry is never solely to be read. They showed me that part of literature's generosity is that one may try a hand in creating it, in joining the great conversation that crisscrosses generations, cultures, languages, and people—the glorious and the meek. As I became a poet, literature—and the power of the language—continued to be my most stable home. Read More: Inside Donald Trump's Mass-Deportation Operation Growing up, I wanted to be like Jack Gilbert, Elizabeth Bishop, even Adrienne Rich, poets who I imagined bore traits I perceived as quintessentially American: so cheerful, I thought, in their privileges that they had to conjure their artistic melancholy. So, at the writing table, I pretended my fears were not mine, but of a stranger; and that I was a typical Asian American, whose problems were 'merely' bigotry and, say, filial piety. Problems that I too confronted but felt safer to discuss on the page than my status. Generations of immigrant writers had demonstrated how one writes on such troubles, and it would be expected of me, since I look like an Asian American. Instead of writing about my whole undocumented self, I pretended I was an actor of heroines, like Joan Chen and Gong Li. Someone who surely had no legal problems to obscure from my classmates. But dishonesty of this nature does not yield good art—at least, not truthful art. And my poems were skittish, little creatures. Like blindfolded sheep, they bumped around the fields of my page, grazing, stumbling, and ultimately beset by the wolves that were my bewildered classmates, who were keen enough readers to notice that these poems weren't quite working, but without the context to understand why. And how could they? A lifetime of pretending I was just another American meant that when I tried to speak honestly, I couldn't actually do it. Ostensibly, I had much to write about. I could've written about how my father had designed hydroelectric dams in Brazil and then labored at a laundromat in New York City. Or how both my parents survived civil war and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Or how, in the U.S., my mother sought refuge in Dami Mission, a doomsday cult that prophesied a mass rapture to heaven. But these were all unavailable to me; I couldn't write about any of it. I first needed to feel secure to tell my story. Perhaps it is surprising to learn that even as a naturalized citizen, I remain wary to this day. My green card arrived when I was 27. Yet I did not travel abroad for another seven years, and that was to Canada. The outside world had become forbidden fruit—and an object of dread. My writing, however, was impatient to change. The year I received my green card, Irish poet and professor Eamon Grennan counseled me. He said: 'Esther, lay bare the narrative field.' What he meant was, tell the story. Tell my story. Slowly, I did. My first decent poems imagined parts of my mother's life. What I guessed about her feelings. I wrote about being her daughter. I described my father's voyage from Hong Kong to Brazil by way of Africa. I wrote about Queens. Eventually, I wrote about my own experience of being undocumented. I followed Grennan's advice: I laid bare the narrative field. My first book, titled Cold Thief Place, reads like a memoir in poems. A memoir was not necessarily my intention, but the book does tell the stories of how my mother frog-leaped from marriage to marriage to defect from China. Of how I muddled through my own marriage, which made me eligible to apply for a green card. Of how two signs, 'European only' and 'Black only,' at a post office in South Africa baffled my father. Telling stories allowed for another discovery: just as I fell in love with the raw, fickleness of the English sentence, its straightforward subject-predicate structure began to enchant me, too. I like a brutally direct poem, with unembroidered language and simple, but elegant, syntax. Such a structure means I cannot hide or delay the revelation of things that are painful but true. I laugh when one of my poems emerges especially dark. It's dark because I was truthful. Sometimes, there is no solace. Unlike African American poets, we undocumented poets do not hold centuries of literary tradition, with great names like Phillis Wheatley, Lawrence Dunbar, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Among the general population, we cannot identify who is undocumented or a citizen—it is taboo to ask casually what an immigrant's visa status is, or it should be taboo to ask about such private, life-determining matters. Like the LGBTQIA+ community, we undocumented may or may not be 'out' about our status. Happily, though, there is a 'we.' In 2015, three poets formed the Undocupoets, an organization that I now co-run, with two other formerly undocumented poets, Janine Joseph and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Our organization awards three $500 fellowships each year to other undocumented poets and raises awareness within and without the literary world. As of this writing, Janine has published two books of poems, most recently Decade of the Brain, and Marcelo has published a book of poems and a memoir, titled Children of the Land. My first book, titled Cold Thief Place, came out in March. So this is a young tradition. Our other work is ensuring that undocumented people and citizens know of this tradition. We don't wish to pass as simply American, as if we do not hold a uniquely American story. Rather, we wish to help archive undocumented art, because we are a fundamental part of this country's history. And we wish to let undocumented writers know that they too are part of a we (if they wish); and that our community is larger than we think. We are vocal; we are present. Contact us at letters@
Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
In Rob Franklin's ‘Great Black Hope,' a life nearly undone in one disastrous moment
Like Franklin, Smith grew up in a world of good schools, successful and involved parents, and regular attendance at church and Jack and Jill. But his life takes a turn after an unexpected drug bust in the Hamptons, the consequences of which loom over the novel, showing, as he says, 'the idea that all of that generational upward mobility could be undone in a single night.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Smith, Elle, and his white friend Caroline all come from financially comfortable backgrounds, but the specifics couldn't be more different, Franklin says. 'I was really interested in writing a novel of manners that pays attention to social codes a lot. Someone like Smith grew up in an upper middle class Black household, a world that's really preoccupied with respectability, and Caroline was raised in a sort of East Coast, European Art world family.' Advertisement It was important to him to avoid over-explaining these telling details. 'I feel like I can trust my readers,' Franklin says. 'Specifically with depicting Black culture for a wider audience, it feels important to me not to set my default audience to white. Treating Black pop and cultural references as equally valid and mainstream — that's really satisfying to the readers who are produced by those worlds, to see them represented on the page but not in this 'teachable moment' way.' Rob Franklin will read at 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 17, at . And now for some recommendations ... Joyce Carol Oates is famously hyper-prolific, so it's no surprise she's written a big summer book — yet somehow her new novel, ' 'It's always a folly in farming to think you know what you're doing,' writes Helen Whybrow in her beautiful memoir, ' Advertisement Another profoundly lovely book about the natural world is Robert Finch's ' Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books section. Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Sean Combs is relying on his celebrity skills in court — but it's a dangerous gamble: source
It's the most important performance of Sean 'Diddy' Combs' life. The rapper/actor/showman has apparently been treating the US District Court in Lower Manhattan as his stage as he is on trial fighting charges of sex trafficking and racketeering. He has allegedly been working so hard to charm the jury that the judge has ordered him to stop interacting with them after Combs, who is used to playing to the crowd, repeatedly made eye contact, smiled and nodded at the eight men and four women set to decide his fate — which, if he is found guilty, could mean life in prison. Advertisement Even his wardrobe — crewneck sweaters in muted neutrals — is a calculated move. 'They're doing it for a reason … every move is thought out,' said one courtroom expert. 'You put him in a blue sweater and it's like you're trying to dupe the jury into believing that he's something he's not.' 6 Before wearing sweaters to court, Sean Combs was a dandy on red carpets. Getty Images, Advertisement 'There is no method or strategy behind Mr. Combs' courtroom wardrobe,' said a representative for Combs's attorney Teny Geragos. 'He did not choose what he's wearing, and no one is advising him on his attire — the court order was very specific about what he could wear. But Combs, who has gone gray without hair dye, is apparently so worried about his appearance he has complained the courtroom sketch artist made him look like a 'koala.' Last week, Combs was reprimanded by Judge Arun Subramanian for repeatedly nodding at jurors. She threatened to throw him out of his own trial and reprimanded him: 'It cannot happen again.' He's also nodded approvingly at one witness who played up his work ethic and appeared disapproving toward another who claimed to have been punished for poor performance. He's entered the courtroom with a smile on his face and while making a heart gesture made with his hands. Advertisement 6 A cape-clad Combs attended the 2023 Met Gala with Yung Miami. Getty Images for Karl Lagerfeld In one instance, when he and a juror both did what they could to ward off the courtroom chill — Combs rubbed his hands, the juror rubbed his arms — the music mogul reportedly looked at the juror and mouthed the word 'Cold,' receiving a smile in return. 'That can get him in trouble,' said a criminal defense attorney who represents rappers and asked not to be identified for fear that an association with Combs could look bad to his clients. 'No lawyer would tell him to do that. In fact, I would advise him against it. Judges tend not to like it.' It's unclear whether or not Judge Subramanian minded Combs engaging with the courtroom sketch artist. Advertisement 6 Combs has been known to smile and make the heart-hands gesture when entering the courtroom. REUTERS 6 Combs has told courtroom sketch artist Jane Rosenberg, 'Soften me up a bit. You're making me look like a koala bear.' REUTERS With no cameras allowed in the courtroom, the work of veteran trial sketcher Jane Rosenberg provides the sole visual record of the proceedings. Like others before him — including Rudy Giuiani, who once told the artist, 'You made me look like my dog!' — Combs is not a fan of Rosenberg's depictions. She has said that the music mogul told her, 'Soften me up a bit. You're making me look like a koala bear.' Meanwhile, Combs, who had his own Sean John fashion line, has been turning out for court as he never did in public. It's been reported that he is alternating between five sets of sweaters, slacks and button-down shirts and two pairs of lace-free shoes (often a rule for the incarcerated). 6 The Menendez brothers, in 1993, leveraged the sweater look while standing trial for murder. AFP via Getty Images 'But, look, we're talking about Diddy. Everyone knows who he is. So it's tough to make that work,' the attorney said of the low-key, non-flashy look. 'Plus, a federal courtroom is a formal setting. I think you should be wearing a suit there. Everyone knows that he can afford a suit.' Advertisement Sweaters have also been courtroom favorites of defendants like Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. The style of burgundy sweater worn by accused murderer Luigi Mangione while pleading not guilty sold out at Nordstrom last December. 6 Combs, now gray-haired without access to hair dye, looks quite different than he did at the Billboard awards in 2022. Getty Images The first major trial to feature defendants in sweaters was Eric and Lyle Menendez's murder trial in 1993, though the siblings favored bright blues, greens and corals in an apparent effort to appear harmless. But the attorney noted that, 'At the end of the day, how the guy dresses will go only so far. There is nothing more eloquent than the facts of the case.'
