The streamer and YouTuber was called to the witness stand, asked to explain how she arrived at the conclusions in her coverage of Megan Thee Stallion. During the criminal case against Toronto rapper Tory Lanez, who was found guilty in 2022 of shooting Megan in the foot during a late-night Los Angeles altercation, Milagro Cooper, known online as Milagro Gramz, had been Lanez’s vocal and persistent defender. Her campaign had allegedly stretched, in one instance, to pointing her X followers toward an AI-generated pornographic video of Megan, whom she had also described as lying under oath.
Megan was in Miami federal court last week after she sued Cooper for defamation and harassment, claiming that the online commentator had coordinated with Lanez and his father to intimidate and discredit her. To some degree, the case revolved around whether Cooper, a new-media creator, constituted a media defendant with the legal protections afforded to traditional journalists. Megan broke down in tears several times during her testimony, according to CBS News. “Though I know it was not me on that video,” Megan told the courtroom, “I felt defeated because the harm had been done.”
On Monday, after two days of deliberations, a jury found Cooper liable for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, while also ruling her to be a media defendant. Jurors awarded Megan $75,000 in damages before the judge in the case reduced the sum to $59,000.
The conclusion of the trial marks yet another installment in the hip-hop saga that engulfed Megan and Lanez beginning in 2020—and the online gossip cottage industry that has sprung from it. In a deposition ahead of trial, Cooper said she typically earned upward of $10,000 a month from her streaming and radio output, and in the case against Lanez, which stemmed from a dispute he had with Megan after they left a party at Kylie Jenner’s Hollywood Hills home, she found an uncommonly explosive and far-reaching subject. The shooting prompted an outpouring of sympathy for Megan, as well as a steady stream of conspiracy theories in support of Lanez, who lost an appeal of his conviction last month and is currently serving 10 years in prison. Anna Paulina Luna, the Florida congresswoman who recently waxed freely about purported UFO and JFK assassination cover-ups in an interview with Joe Rogan, took up the cause this year, calling on California governor Gavin Newsom to pardon Lanez.
One of the primary narrators of the overarching matter has been Meghann Cuniff, the independent legal reporter whose coverage of Lanez’s trial made her an everyday fixture of the surrounding social media chatter. Cuniff, who was soon nicknamed “Meghann Thee Reporter,” has been in Miami covering the defamation trial and said in an interview that she was struck by the vitriol on display.
