Hip-hop producer Metro Boomin accused of rape in lawsuit | Music

A Los Angeles woman has filed a lawsuit alleging that Metro Boomin, a Grammy-nominated producer who has worked with some of the biggest names in hip-hop and R&B, raped her in 2016 and she became pregnant from the attack.

The producer’s attorney calls the accusations false and said the lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles superior court is “a pure shakedown”.

Vanessa LeMaistre, 38, says in the lawsuit that she became friends with Metro Boomin, whose legal name is Leland Wayne, after the death of her nine-month-old son. While visiting him in a recording studio months later, she blacked out and woke on a bed to find Wayne raping her, the lawsuit alleges.

She learned she was pregnant from the attack a few weeks later, the suit says.

An attorney for the 31-year-old St Louis-born producer immediately denied the allegations.

“This is a pure shakedown. These are false accusations,” Lawrence Hinkle II said in a statement Wednesday. “Mr. Wayne refused to pay her months ago, and he refuses to pay her now. Mr. Wayne will defend himself in court. He will file a claim for malicious prosecution once he prevails.”

Wayne curated the soundtrack to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and co-produced most of the songs on the album. His 2022 album Heroes & Villains, featuring contributions from John Legend, The Weeknd and Travis Scott, was nominated for a Grammy for best rap album. He has also worked with Future, Kendrick Lamar, Offset, 21 Savage and A$AP Rocky.

LeMaistre said in the suit that she met Wayne in the spring of 2016 at a party in Las Vegas and in the months that followed they met up several times and she “believed that they had bonded over the ability of music to help people in their darkest moments”.

Around September, she visited him at a California recording studio where she was given a shot of alcohol and took half a bar of Xanax.

“The next thing Ms. LeMaistre can recall is waking up on a bed in a different location with Wayne raping her and being completely unable to move or make a sound,” the lawsuit says. “She was in and out of consciousness for an unknown amount of time but awoke again at some point to Wayne performing oral sex on her.”

At no point was she able to consent, the lawsuit says.

She learned she was pregnant a few weeks later, and there was no question that the child was Wayne’s, the suit says. She had an abortion soon after.

The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly, as LeMaistre has. She is named in the lawsuit and consented to being publicly identified through her attorneys.

Her lawsuit alleging sexual battery and gender violence seeks damages to be determined at trial.