Travis Scott is facing new accusations that he caused a 2019 stampede at Rolling Loud in Miami, including by flatly ignoring police demands to shut down the “dangerous and uncontrollable” concert.
Scott, who is separately facing hundreds of legal claims over the deadly Astroworld festival, was added last month as a defendant to an existing lawsuit filed against Rolling Loud’s organizers in 2020 by Marchelle Love, a woman who says she was severely injured during the May 2019 incident.
In the latest version of the complaint, Love’s attorneys claim that police rushed backstage shortly after Scott began his set and demanded that he stop performing because the crowd was getting unsafe – a plea that the star rapper allegedly disregarded.
“Despite his being ordered by the authorities to cease his continued incitement of the crowd, Travis Scott continued to verbally and physically incite the crowd to engage in a mosh pit and other hazardous activities,” Love’s lawyers wrote. “Despite the fact that Travis Scott was aware of and could clearly see concertgoers being injured, suffocating, losing consciousness, fighting, and being trampled, he continued his performance while authorities were forced to attempt to render aid to these injured concertgoers.”
In a statement to Billboard, a rep for Scott called the new accusations a “blatant, cynical attempt to attack Travis” over a “3-year-old incident that is deliberately misrepresented.” They stressed that the stampede at Rolling Loud, as reported by Pitchfork and other outlets at the time, was caused by a false report of an active shooter that sparked panic in the crowd.
“As even the complaint makes clear, this incident was related to a false report of a shooting mid-show, completely unrelated to Travis’s performance,” Scott’s rep said. “This cheap opportunism is based on a blatant lie that’s easy to detect. And it is particularly telling that this plaintiff’s lawyer didn’t even assert a claim against Travis when he originally filed the complaint on behalf of his client more than two years ago or in four prior versions of that complaint.”
The new legal documents included a photo that allegedly showed Scott interacting with police officers, as well as another that showed him continuing to perform as authorities attempted to rescue injured concertgoers from crowd. But Scott’s representatives said that image was taken as police were informing Scott of the false shooting report and that he “fully cooperated” with their requests.
In addition to Scott (whose real name is Jacques Bermon Webster II), the case also named as a defendant Sequel Tour Solutions, a contractor that allegedly provided security and crowd management services for Rolling Loud, as well as SLS Consulting, an engineering company that allegedly created safety plans for the event. When it was filed in 2020, it originally named various other Rolling Loud organizers, but they were dropped from the case earlier this year.
