American rapper, Megan Thee Stallion has denied allegations made against her by her former cameraman in a new lawsuit.
In the suit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, Emilio Garcia claims he was inside a moving vehicle with the rapper while she had sex with a woman. He accuses his former employer, real name Megan Pete, of harassment and creating a hostile work environment.
Reacting to the allegation, Megan Thee Stallion’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, said: “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.”
Garcia further claims in the suit that following the alleged incident he was warned: “Don’t ever discuss what you saw.”
He says he was subsequently treated differently by the 29-year-old Grammy winner, and that she created a “hostile, abusive work environment”, which made his “working conditions intolerable”.
Garcia first worked for Megan as a personal cameraman in 2018 and held a full-time role with the rapper from 2019 until June 2023.
In his lawsuit, Garcia says that he travelled with the star to the Spanish island of Ibiza in June 2022. He claims that while in an SUV with Megan and three other women after a night out, the rapper had sex with one of the women as they drove.
“I felt uncomfortable. I was kind of frozen, and I was shocked. At kind of just the overall audacity to do this right, right beside me,” Garcia told NBC News.
The cameraman also alleges that during the same trip, Megan fat-shamed him by calling him a “fat b****” and telling him to “spit your food out” as “you don’t need to be eating”.
“To hear someone who advocates about loving your body tell me these things,” Garcia told NBC, “I felt degraded.”
He says that he then saw a decrease in the jobs he was being hired to do. The night before a job in June 2023 he says he was notified by Megan’s management company, Roc Nation, that “his services would no longer be required”.
The lawsuit goes on to claim that Garcia was subjected to “a barrage of relentless sexual and fat-shaming comments”, which caused the photographer “profound emotional distress”.
It also states that as Megan failed to provide her employee with medical insurance, he was and remains unable to receive care as he “grapples with mounting anxiety, depression, and physical distress stemming from the toxic work environment”.
In a statement, Garcia’s attorney Ron Zambrano said: “Megan just needs to pay our client what he’s due, own up to her behaviour and quit this sort of sexual harassment and fat-shaming conduct. Emilio should never have been put in a position of having to be in the vehicle with her while she had sex with another woman. ‘Inappropriate’ is putting it lightly. Exposing this behaviour to employees is definitely illegal.”