The never-ending Young Thug trial that could reshape hip-hop

ATLANTA — Two years in the Fulton County court system have turned Young Thug into an iPad kid. With each passing day, he looks less and less like the musical prodigy who came out of the Atlanta projects and redefined the sound and style of trap. Who spent his 20s touring the world and blowing minds, just as likely to pose for cameras in a leather jacket as a billowing couture dress. Now, he wears a blank face in the chilly courtroom where guards deposit him most mornings.

The man born Jeffery Lamar Williams, now 32, pecks at a tablet. He swipes, he taps, he barely rises when the judge walks in. Thug paws at the screen as lawyers who will help decide whether he spends the next 20 years in prison crack their morning sodas and their morning jokes. “Is that Schlitz?” the judge asks. “Gotta stay warm in here somehow,” an attorney says. Ha ha ha. Tap tap tap.

It is a February morning, the 654th day since Williams was jailed without bond and accused of running a murderous gang posing as a red-hot record label. Jury selection lasted a full year; the trial is likely to run past the next presidential election. When a forensic biologist takes the stand to explain the finer points of a “molecular Xerox machine” in relation to an alleged assault from 2013, Thug crosses his arms across his 6-foot-3-inch frame, closes his eyes and sinks toward the defense table. On the gallery’s hard wooden benches, where a scrap of foam is impressed with the butt cheeks of some long-gone observer, a deputy will nod off before the hearing ends.

This is the same case that has obsessed the rap world and drawn scrutiny from legal scholars for its high drama and high stakes. It’s the trial that has made tabloid headlines for its mishaps: pornographic Zoom-bombing and jurors’ faces accidentally live-streamed. One of Williams’s co-defendants has been accused of a hand-to-hand drug swap in full view of the judge. A deputy was arrested for allegedly smuggling contraband into jail and having an “inappropriate relationship” with another co-defendant who has since been severed from the case.

“It’s been a wild ride,” said Jack Lerner, co-author of “Rap on Trial: A Legal Guide for Attorneys,” who is following the trial along with innumerable rap fans, concerned about its potential chilling effect on the industry. “They brought this massive [racketeering] case into a regular Georgia courtroom, Fulton County courtroom, that really wasn’t set up for a case this massive.”

But most days are morbid monotony. Thug stares forlornly into the news cameras. Living on chips and chocolate in jail, his lawyers say, he sleeps little. They say the government is trying to silence a generational Black artist using a case so thin that the indictment document cites Thug’s own lyrics as “overt act[s] in furtherance of the conspiracy.”

“Gave the lawyer close to two mil. He handles all the killings,” Thug sang on 2019’s album “So Much Fun,” now transcribed in the official court records. “We don’t speak ’bout s— on wax. It’s all mob business. We know to kill the biggest cats of all kittens.”

The Fulton County Superior Courthouse sits less than five miles from Cleveland Avenue, nicknamed Bleveland Avenue for the Bloods-affiliated gangs that dominate the neighborhood, where Williams was raised as one of 11 children.

His childhood apartment was demolished when he was about 18 years old. A few years later, Thug released his debut mixtape “I Came From Nothing.”

He sounded like no one else in the macho world of Southern rap, layering sophomoric and nonsensical lyrics over hard-nosed trap beats. The Washington Post’s music critic Chris Richards would later describe his work as the sound of a “world being dismantled.”

Thug was quickly scooped up by legendary Atlanta artist Gucci Mane, with whom he shares an ice cream cone face tattoo, and his career only accelerated. He left Bleveland for Buckhead — a tony part of Atlanta near a shopping mall with storefronts of Cartier and Gucci. By 2019, Thug had won a Grammy, collaborated with Elton John and established himself as one of the hottest upcoming stars in the fast-evolving world of rap.

Fame and money amplified Thug’s unique style. His manager told a Fader reporter in 2014 that he “eats no real food.” GQ wrote two years later he was injected with vitamins each month. He once ordered everyone who entered his home to wear white, according to a Complex reporter. He wore an Alessandro Trincone dress for the cover of his 2016 album “Jeffery.” The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston later displayed the dress in its “Gender Bending Fashion” exhibition.

He is unapologetically a rapper of the South, which has largely displaced acts from the East and West coasts on the charts. When a Complex reporter drove with Thug by a 20-story housing project in Manhattan in 2021, Thug envied the balcony views not seen in Atlanta projects.

“That is why you can’t compare to us, because you can still go to the top floor of your building and see the world, and see how you want to be,” he said. “We gotta literally go to prison and get put on an airplane to get this high.”

Thug’s rise in the 2010s loosely coincided with increasing public concern about violent crime in Atlanta, with calls for authorities to take major action. Prosecutors under District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) set their sights on Young Thug and about two dozen others believed to be associated with him. Investigators searched social media posts for gang signs and came to believe that some of Thug’s lyrics about crimes and shootings were based in reality.

Thug was one of 28 people arrested in raids across the city on May 9, 2022. An 88-page indictment lays out the government’s case that they operated as a gang called Young Slime Life — which prosecutors noted bore the same initials as Thug’s music label, Young Stoner Life.

“The members and associates of YSL moved like a pack, with defendant Jeffery Williams as its head,” lead prosecutor Adriane Love would say during opening statements at the trial.

Specifically, Thug was accused of renting a car used in the fatal 2015 drive-by that led to a gang war between two Bloods sets. But he was accused of involvement in a long list of homicides, armed robberies, aggravated assaults, theft, drug dealing, carjacking and witness intimidation that his co-defendants are charged with.

Thug’s attorney Brian Steel denies the charges against his client, who pleaded not guilty.

“The prosecution has taken a young man who was born into no opportunity, despair and hardship. And he has become a world-renowned, award-winning musical artist,” Steel told The Post last year.

Thug has essentially lived behind bars since his arrest, barring infrequent excursions such as a trip to his sister’s funeral last year. He is driven 20 miles from his jail cell to the courthouse every weekday morning, to bear silent witness to one of the most complex racketeering cases in Georgia’s history.

Legal experts told The Post that it is unconventional that Thug and his co-defendants are being prosecuted under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) — a legal framework prominently used in the 1980s to punish mafia activity, and which Willis and her prosecutors will also use to try former president Donald Trump on election fraud charges this summer.

RICO laws allow prosecutors to dismantle entire criminal organizations, from the street level to the top. If convicted, Thug and his five remaining co-defendants (the others either cut plea deals or will be tried separately) could face up to two decades in prison. But RICO cases are also notoriously massive, complicated and unwieldy, creating opportunity for disruptions and delays — all on ample display during this case’s long windup.

The screams startled everyone. It was April 19, 2023 — midway through the case’s year-long jury selection process that sifted through more than 2,000 potential people. Thug’s head shot up and some of his co-defendants leaped to their feet as Rodalius Ryan — an alleged member of Thug’s crew already serving life in prison for a 2015 murder — cried for help from a cell down a hallway from the courtroom.

Footage of the incident shows deputies almost losing control of the room. Cordarius Dorsey, another co-defendant, tried to barge past deputies at the door in an apparent attempt to reach Ryan. Max Schardt, who was representing Shannon Stillwell, implored the room with outstretched arms: “Everybody just chill!”

It was later reported that Ryan was screaming as deputies strip searched him. They allegedly found two packages of marijuana sewn into his underwear, according to body-camera footage aired on local news.

On most days, the courtroom is kept under control by Judge Ural D. Glanville, a career Army man and a joyful disciplinarian, who enters the courtroom each day with his service dog, a black Labrador named Jack.

When a potential juror skipped court to visit the Dominican Republic last year, Glanville ordered them to write a 30-page essay in APA style, with primary and secondary sources. When a juror asked for the courtroom to be made warmer, Glanville replied that he kept it cold to keep everyone awake. The judge told an attorney who showed up late to a hearing in May that he would be held in contempt unless he bought everyone lunch. (The lawyer ordered chicken wings from a nearby strip club.) And as Glanville grows frustrated with the trial’s plodding pace — prosecutors by mid-April had so far only made it through about a quarter of more than 200 expected witnesses — he has threatened to hold court on the weekends.

But the surreality of the case sometimes gets away from the judge. Glanville inadvertently went viral on social media in the trial’s first week for reading out Young Thug’s lyrics in his monotone drawl. “F— the police (f— ’em), in a high speed,” Glanville recited, butchering the flow. “F— the judge.”

Other incidents have been more serious. A video of a defendant’s interrogation was leaked online last year, sparking an investigation. A defense attorney in the trial has been arrested on charges of bringing prescription pills into the courthouse and allegedly throwing his cellphone at a deputy’s head. A potential juror was briefly jailed for recording court proceedings.

Less than a month of the start of the long-anticipated trial, in December, Glanville paused proceedings for several weeks after Stillwell was stabbed in the Fulton County Jail.

Prosecutors have been using rap lyrics as evidence since at least the 1990s, with mixed success and despite criticism that White musicians are rarely accused of doing the things they sing about. (No one ever charged Johnny Cash for saying he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.)

“I think we should all be uneasy when forms of artistic expression are taken as literal truths almost as public confession. There’s a real slippery slope,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta.

Asked for comment, the DA’s office pointed to the judge’s November 2023 ruling that “the lyric and related social media evidence is logically and legally relevant and, thus, conditionally admitted.”

The trial is a sensation online, with thousands of comments under a live stream from the courtroom and entertainment sites covering every legal argument and cultural repercussion. “Chance the Rapper’s Birthday Wish Is For Young Thug To Be Released From Jail,” read a BET headline Wednesday.

In Atlanta, where rap is a multibillion-dollar industry, up-and-coming artists also have a wary eye on the trial.

“They’re looking at [DA] Fani [Willis] like she’s turned Atlanta into Gotham,” said musician Langston Bleu. “It’s not cool to be guilty of something just because you’re really good at selling that.”

Atlanta musician Cade Fortunat, who sings under the name 4TUNAT, found it laughable that lyrics could be considered evidence. When a rapper puts the word “Glock” or “AK-47” into a track, he said, they are more likely to be considering the syllabic structure of the word than remembering a real event.

Z6Saint, native Atlantean and rapper, noted Young Thug’s imprisonment has not drawn many public protests. But he worries what will happen to the next generation of rappers if Thug and others are muzzled.

“I don’t think people are too worried about it,” he said. “They probably should be more worried about it.”

If Thug has been chilled, it’s not readily apparent. He released a new album, “Business Is Business” in June 2023, illustrated with an image of himself at the defense table beneath an empty judge’s bench.