A$AP Rocky has pleaded not guilty to assault at the start of his trial in Sweden in a case that has strained international relations after celebrity entertainers rallied to the US rapper’s cause and Donald Trump publicly demanded his release.
Prosecutors allege the platinum-selling artist, whose real name is Rakim Mayers, and two members of his entourage “deliberately, together and in agreement” attacked the alleged victim, Mustafa Jafari, in the Swedish capital on 30 June.
The men, who say they were responding to harassment and provocations, have been in custody since 3 July and face up to two years in prison if the charges, for assault causing actual bodily harm, are upheld. Their trial lasts until Friday.
“He admits that he threw the plaintiff on the ground, that he stepped on his arm and punched or pushed his shoulder,” Mayers’ lawyer, Slobodan Jovicic, told the court, but insisted that it was a case of self-defence.
Named after one half of the hip-hop duo Eric B. & Rakim, Rakim Athelaston Mayers was born in New York in 1988. He adopted the name A$AP Rocky when he began his career in 2007, joining the A$AP Mob crew.
Mayers had a troubled childhood. His elder brother was murdered, his dad was arrested for drug dealing, and he spent some time moving around homeless shelters with his mother and sister. His older sister died of a drug overdose in 2016. Mayers himself served two weeks in prison for drug dealing in 2004.
He came to prominence with the release of the mixtape Live.Love.A$AP in 2011. Having signed to a major-label deal for a reported $3m, his 2013 debut album, Long.Live.A$AP debuted at No 1 on the US Billboard 200. Follow-up At.Long.Last.A$AP was also a No 1 album in the US, certified as a platinum seller, and featured a seemingly unlikely collaboration with Rod Stewart.
His creative partner and best friend A$AP Yams (Steven Rodriguez) died in January 2015 in an accidental drug overdose. In 2016, Mayers became the first African-American to be the face of Dior Homme.
In 2013, he was charged with slapping a woman at Philadelphia’s Made in America festival. This was eventually settled out of court in 2015. He has been involved in other altercations, in Toronto, New Zealand, and London, the latter involving a bagel and an Uber in Brick Lane. He unexpectedly declared a love of the Piccadilly Line while delivering the Red Bull Music Academy lecture in the city, and has collaborated with British rapper Skepta on the acclaimed track Praise the Lord (Da Shine).
He has caused controversy by appearing to describe the Black Lives Matter movement as a “bandwagon”, saying “I don’t wanna talk about no fucking Ferguson and shit because I don’t live over there. I live in fucking SoHo and Beverly Hills. I can’t relate.”
Mayers, 30, dressed in prison uniform of a green T-shirt and trousers, sat next to his lawyer in Stockholm district court but did not speak. His mother, Renee Black, was also in court. Both the rapper and Jafari, 19, will face cross-examination later on Tuesday.
Entertainment industry figures including Kim Kardashian West, Justin Bieber, Post Malone and Shawn Mendes have backed a #JusticeForRocky campaign. The US president called the Swedish prime minister, Stefan Löfven, to ask that the rapper be freed on bail – a system that does not exist in Sweden.
The public prosecutor, Daniel Suneson, showed the court phone and CCTV footage that he said showed Mayers and the two other men assaulting Jafari by kicking him and beating him with whole or part of a glass bottle.
Jafari is claiming SEK 139,700 (£12,050) in damages for the alleged attack, arguing “the perpetrator had shown great ruthlessness and cruelty”. Suneson said the incident started outside a hamburger restaurant on Hötorget in the city centre.
Mayers and his five-strong entourage were approached by the plaintiff and another man, the prosecutor told the court, who were “argumentative and perceived as intrusive and difficult”. This led to a confrontation in which a bodyguard “first pushed away the plaintiff, then lifted him up by the throat”, he said.
Suneson said Jafari’s headphones were broken and thrown on to a restaurant awning in the brawl, which escalated in Olofsgatan, a neighbouring street, where the 19-year old, who was demanding his headphones back, was “beaten, thrown to the ground and beaten again”.
The prosecutor showed the court videos of the alleged assault and police photographs of bloodstains and broken glass left in the street, as well as of Jafari’s injuries, which included a broken rib and cuts to his head, arms and legs that required hospital treatment and stitches.
Much of the footage emerged before the trial, posted both by the celebrity news website TMZ and by Mayers to his own Instagram account. The rapper wrote in a caption that two men had been following his group and one had hit a bodyguard in the face with headphones. He was innocent, he said.
Suneson, who has filed more than 500 pages of court documents, said before the trial that after reviewing videos and witness statements he had concluded “the events in question constituted a crime”. He had “access to a greater amount of material than what has been available on the internet”, he noted.
A lawyer for Jafari, Magnus Stromberg, said the beating started when one of Mayers’ bodyguards “grabbed him by the neck and dragged him away”. Jafari did not provoke the assault, he said. A countersuit filed against Jafari by a member of Mayers’ security team was dropped after prosecutors determined Jafari had acted in self-defence.
One of the rapper’s lawyers, Martin Persson, told Aftonbladet newspaper the defence would present evidence suggesting it was not clear a bottle had even been used in the alleged attack, let alone by whom. “We have an ace up our sleeve,” he said. “The men acted in emergency defence … It was proportionate and within the law.”
The case turned into a minor diplomatic incident after Kardashian West appealed directly to Trump, prompting the president to tweet that he would “call the very talented Prime Minister of Sweden to see what we can do about helping A$AP Rocky”.
The two men spoke by phone for 20 minutes, with Trump offering to “personally vouch for [Mayers’] bail, or an alternative”. Löfven issued a statement saying that in Sweden “everyone is equal before the law” and the judicial system, prosecutors and courts were completely independent.
Trump subsequently tweeted that he was “very disappointed” in Löfven, adding: “Give A$AP Rocky his FREEDOM. We do so much for Sweden but it doesn’t seem to work the other way around. Sweden should focus on its real crime problem!”
That drew an indignant response from several leading political figures in Sweden. “The rule of the law applies to everyone equally and is exercised by an independent judiciary,” tweeted the former prime minister Carl Bildt. “That’s the way it is in the US, and that’s certainly the way it is in Sweden. Political interference is distinctly off limits. Clear?”
