The Kelsey Harris who spent hours on the stand in a Los Angeles courtroom this week had no idea who shot Megan Thee Stallion.
She said she couldn’t remember if the man accused of the crime, Canadian rapper Tory Lanez, had offered her money in exchange for her silence in court. She wouldn’t even say definitively that Megan Thee Stallion had been shot, repeatedly noting that’s what “Megan’s team” told her, even though there’s no dispute that she sat next to the bloodied hit maker that night in an SUV.
The most important details of that July 2020 night were “a blur,” Harris said in court this week, memories lost to an alcohol-induced fog caused by doing one too many shots at a Hollywood Hills party hosted by makeup mogul Kylie Jenner.
The Kelsey Harris who spoke to prosecutors for one hour and 20 minutes in September, however, had a much clearer memory.
“You start hearing gunshots … I look up maybe at the second or third gunshot … you see Tory … he’s leaning over, the door’s open,” Harris said, according to a tape of the interview played in court Friday. “He’s shooting over the top of the door, the right front passenger side.”
The chasm between the two stories woven by Harris three months apart will play a critical role when jurors begin deliberating next week on the assault charges filed against Lanez, whose real name is Daystar Peterson.
With the prosecution’s star witness gone rogue in court, legal experts say jurors could choose to believe the version of her that exists on tape, calmly identifying Peterson as the shooter. But the confusion could just as easily prove fertile ground for reasonable doubt and lead to an acquittal.
“It’s a defense lawyer’s dream,” said Dmitriy Shakhnevich, a New York defense attorney and professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Any defense lawyer would say look to the extent that you don’t know what’s going on … that the burden is on the prosecution. You look at the…