What we learned from Megan Thee Stallion’s Doc ‘In Her Own Words’

What we learned from Megan Thee Stallion's Doc 'In Her Own Words'

Photo: Taylor Hill/Getty Images

Stimuli can hurt, too. Megan Thee Stallion knows this firsthand. Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Words, the rapper’s nearly two-hour Amazon Prime documentary, separates her public persona as a Grammy Award-winning “sexy girl coach” from her private experiences as a young woman; In other words, it aims to show Megan Pitt behind Megan Thee Stallion. The documentary traces her path from rising Houston rapper to global star, focusing on the aftermath of her mother’s death and Tory Lanez’ shooting. It reveals Meghan’s struggle to show strength as a public symbol of confidence while struggling with grief, anxiety, and loneliness. Here’s what you should know.

Megan’s mother, Holly Thomas, was her role model, coach, best friend and number one fan. She’s been portrayed as the platonic ideal of a mother, the one who would immediately pinpoint where Meghan’s birth was missing but would also help take gorgeous photos of her daughter at the right angle. One day, Megan received an urgent call from her mother asking her to call 911; Doctors discovered a brain tumor, and Holly’s health rapidly deteriorated from then on. In the end, Holly was brain dead. Meghan, as the only surviving member of her immediate family – her father died when she was 15 – was forced to make the decision to end life support.

In the wake of her mother’s death, Meghan has been busy with work and partying. “I keep lighting up thinking I’ll get over the pain,” she says in the doc.

Fatherless and heartbroken, Megan began regularly hanging out with Tory Lanez, whom she hooked up with after he told her his mother had also died. She considered Lenz a good friend — until the evening of July 12, 2020, when he shot her in the foot after a drunken fight. Meghan repeats in the documentary that she was afraid to admit what really happened to the police shortly after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, so she lied and said she had run over the glass. I thought the police might kill them all.

That wasn’t the end of it. The documentary shows Lanez’s prison phone call with Kelsey Harris, Meghan’s best friend and assistant at the time, in which he asks her to “figure out what you gotta do to save me from this shit.” (This isn’t new information, but it’s still shocking to hear.) As we already know, Kelsey turned on Megan over her belief that she slept with Lanez, leading to a media circus that portrayed the incident as a fight between the two women. The double betrayal left Megan alone because she closed herself off.

In a 2022 interview on CBS Morning, Gayle King pressed Meghan on whether she had ever had a sexual relationship with Lynes. Meghan’s denial, which was immediately blasted by skeptics as a lie, will be recirculated as evidence of her supposed lack of trustworthiness. Megan admits in the documentary that she didn’t tell the truth on air — in her telling, she hooked up with Lanez once or twice, when she was drunk — but she stayed focused on the truth of the matter, which is that none of this excuses her. He gets shot. Ultimately, all of this is a distraction from the fact that she was shot in the foot.

The documentary highlights the significant hostility Meghan has faced since the beginning of her career, pulling out old news clips, podcast recordings, TikTok videos, and more. Surprisingly, Tucker Carlson emerges as one of her tamer critics, making a predictable complaint about the corrupting influence of her sexually positive music. What’s shocking about the documentary is the amount of Lenz’s defenders (or depraved misogynists looking for a convenient reason) who have come out of the woodwork to attack Meghan. This includes podcasters who call her a liar, known abusers like Chris Brown who jump through hoops to testify about Lanez’s character, and clout chasers like Drake who slanders Megan…just because. It’s not just men: a lot of women are ready to throw it under the bus too. Meghan recently filed a lawsuit against blogger and YouTuber Milagro Gramz for carrying out a “campaign of harassment and cyberbullying,” which included circulating fake pornography of Meghan.

The harassment campaign — which included death threats and jokes about how Lynes should have “finished the job” — made Meghan nervous for her safety, especially in crowds. Constant stress and anxiety also caused Megan to become paralyzed and contemplate suicide. “I would rather not be in this situation than live with it,” she recalls. Eventually, in 2022, after someone broke into her house while she was performing on SNL, she had to clear her schedule and spend one month in a mental health retreat. There, she visited the shooting incident every day with the attending physician. One silver lining: She left treatment feeling like a new person.

Even in her weakest moments, Meghan is admirably principled and brave in the documentary. She pushes herself to keep going, knowing that’s what her mother wants. “You have to be strong,” she says, commenting on her decision to testify at Lanez’s 2022 trial, where he was convicted of three felony counts: assault with a semi-automatic handgun; carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle; Discharging a firearm with gross negligence. “I know someone somewhere is going through something similar.” The documentary shows her crying as she receives the news of his conviction in her home, and although the hate against her continues, she says she is improving: “I feel like I’ve gotten to a place where I don’t really care.” “.

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