What We Learned From the Megan Thee Stallion Documentary
Hotties can hurt too. Megan The Stallion knows this intimately. Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Words, the rapper’s nearly two-hour Amazon Prime documentary, separates her public persona as an unflappable, Grammy-winning “hot girl coach” from her private experience as a young woman; in other words, it aims to show the Megan Pete behind Megan Thee Stallion. The documentary traces her trajectory from up-and-coming Houston freestyle rapper to global superstar, focusing on the aftermath of her mother’s death and her shooting by Tory Lanez. It reveals Megan’s struggle to project strength as a public symbol of confidence while battling with grief, anxiety, and loneliness. Here’s what you should know.
Megan was forced to pull the plug on her mother’s life.
Megan’s mom, Holly Thomas, was her role model, coach, confidante, and No. 1 fan. She’s portrayed as the platonic ideal of a momager, someone who would instantly identify where Megan’s delivery was lacking but also help take thotty 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 quickly deteriorated from there. By the end, Holly was brain-dead. Megan, as the only surviving member of her immediate family — her father passed away when she was 15 — was forced to make the decision to end life support.
In the wake of her mother’s death, Megan threw herself into work and partying. “I just keep being lit thinking I’d get through the pain,” she says in the doc.
2020 was the “worst year” of Megan’s life.
Parentless and grieving, Megan started hanging out regularly with Torey Lanez, whom she bonded with after he’d shared that his mom had also passed away. She considered Lanez a good friend — until the infamous evening of July 12, 2020, when he shot her in the foot after a drunken argument. Megan reiterates in the documentary that she was terrified to confess what really happened to the police so soon after George Floyd had been killed in May 2020, so she lied and said she stepped on glass. She thought the police might kill them all.
That wasn’t the end of it. The documentary plays Lanez’s jail phone call to Megan’s then-best friend and assistant, Kelsey Harris, in which he tells her to “figure out what you need to do to bail me out of this shit.” (This is not new information, but it’s still shocking to hear.) As we already know, Kelsey turned on Megan for thinking she slept with Lanez, resulting in a media circus that framed the incident as a catfight between the two women. The double betrayal left Megan lonely as she closed herself off.
Megan admits she lied to Gayle King.
In a 2022 CBS Mornings interview, Gayle King pressed Megan on whether she had ever had a sexual relationship with Lanez. Megan’s denial, which her skeptics immediately slammed as a lie, would be recirculated as evidence about 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 drunk — but stays focused on the truth of the matter, which is that none of this justifies her being shot. At the end of the day, all of this is a distraction from the reality she has bullet wounds in her foot.
The campaign against her kept on going … and going.
The documentary highlights the outsize animosity Megan has faced from the start of her career, pulling up old news segments, podcast recordings, TikTok videos, and more. Surprisingly, Tucker Carlson comes off as one of her tamer critics, lodging a predictable complaint about her sex-positive music’s corrupting influence. What’s shocking to witness in the documentary is the volume of Lanez apologists (or incorrigible misogynists looking for a convenient cause) who come out of the woodwork to attack Megan. This includes bro podcasters calling her a liar, known abusers like Chris Brown jumping over hoops to testify to Lanez’s character, and clout chasers like Drake dissing Megan … just because. It’s not just men: Plenty of women are willing to throw her under the bus too. Megan recently sued blogger and YouTuber Milagro Gramz for executing a “campaign of harassment and cyberbullying,” which included circulating deepfake porn of Megan.
Megan has suffered from performance anxiety and suicidal thoughts.
The harassment campaign — which included death threats and jokes about how Lanez should have “finished the job” — made Megan nervous for her safety, especially around crowds. Constant stress and anxiety also caused Megan to become immobilized and experience suicidal ideation. “I would rather not live through this than to have to live with this,” 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 at a mental-health retreat. There, she revisited the shooting incident every day with the therapist. One silver lining: She left therapy feeling like a new person.
Megan is tenacious as hell.
Even at her weakest moments, Megan comes off impressively principled and courageous in the documentary. She pushes herself to carry on, knowing that’s what her mom would want. “You gotta be strong,” she says, commenting on her decision to testify at Lanez’s 2022 trial, where he was convicted of three felony charges: assault with a semi-automatic handgun; carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle; and discharging a firearm with gross negligence. “I know somebody somewhere is going through something similar.” The documentary shows her sobbing as she receives the news of his conviction at her home, and though the hate against her continues, she says she’s doing better: “I do feel like I’m getting to a place where I really don’t care.”
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