One of rapper Megan Thee Stallion's former employees filed a lawsuit against her this Tuesday. Her former cameraman, Emilio García, is suing her in Los Angeles County Superior Court for sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment.
The most concerning part of the lawsuit dates back to July 2022. Megan Thee Stallion was in Ibiza (Spain) and she forced the plaintiff to watch her having sex with a woman, as García told NBC News.
According to the cameraman, he was in a vehicle when Megan and three other women went out partying. While the car was moving, the artist began to have sex with another woman. The cameraman described the situation as "uncomfortable."
"I felt uncomfortable. I was kind of frozen, and I was shocked. At kind of just be the overall audacity to do this right, right beside me," he explained. When the rapper, the next day, found out that García had seen everything and that he was in the car, she threatened him: "Don’t ever discuss what you saw," said the cameraman.
The hostile work environment created by Megan Thee Stallion
But the harassment didn't stop there. There was another dynamic between Emilio García and Megan Thee Stallion that affected the rapper's former employee in a more personal way, since, according to García, it created a hostile work environment.
According to the cameraman, the rapper took advantage of his physique and called him a "fat bit**" in addition to telling him to "spit your food out" since, in Thee Stallion's opinion, "you don’t need to be eating." A way of addressing García that, the plaintiff explains, affected him: "To hear someone who advocates about loving your body tell me these things ... I felt degraded."
In addition, the former worker claims in the lawsuit that he had to endure "a barrage of relentless sexual and fat-shaming comments plunging him into profound emotional distress."
Decrease in compensation
Emilio García's financial compensation was also affected. The cameraman explains that, after returning from the trip to Ibiza, his fixed monthly rate was modified by a new payment system that required him to present an invoice for each task. He also claims that he saw a decrease in the bookings that Megan hired him for.
Emilio García told NBC News that "there’s no HR department in the entertainment business" and that he knows he has to defend himself:
What I learned throughout the years is that, especially coming from an office environment, is you know, there’s no HR department in the entertainment business. So if you don’t know that you’re being done wrong, you don’t really know how to advocate for yourself until you start asking maybe you start asking your peers who have representation, they have agents, they have management, they have attorneys. So I just really just want to encourage people to advocate for themselves.
Megan Thee Stallion's lawyers claim that they will fight Emilio García's lawsuit. In statements collected by Variety, Alex Spiro stated that the accusations have no basis and that they would go to court to fight the lawsuit:
This is an employment claim for money — with no sexual harassment claim filed and with salacious accusations to attempt to embarrass her. We will deal with this in court.
