A Los Angeles jury has cleared Cardi B of all charges in a civil trial where a security guard accused the rap superstar of assault and battery during her first pregnancy. According to BBC News, jurors took just about an hour to find the Grammy-winning rapper not liable for assault, battery, negligence, false imprisonment, or intentional infliction of emotional distress. Emani Ellis had sued Cardi for $24 million, claiming the Bronx-born rapper cut her cheek with a 3-inch acrylic nail and spat on her outside an obstetrician’s office in 2018.
Cardi, who at the time was four months pregnant with her first child with rapper Offset, denied ever laying a finger on Ellis. “She couldn’t get a scratch from me because I didn’t touch her,” Cardi testified during the trial. The “Am I The Drama” star said Ellis, then working as a security guard, followed and filmed her, intruding on what Cardi described as a private doctor’s visit arranged to protect her pregnancy from public exposure.
“Yes I was angry!” she told the court. “Because I’m pregnant! And this girl’s about to beat my a**!” Still, Cardi insisted that while the two women were chest-to-chest in a heated verbal exchange, the confrontation never turned physical.
The trial, held in a small Alhambra courthouse, made headlines as Cardi’s candid testimony veered from explaining her rhinestone-covered “coffin-shaped” nails to recounting the stress of keeping her pregnancy private during her “freshman year” of superstardom. A receptionist from the doctor’s office supported Cardi’s account, saying she never saw physical fighting and even thought the scratch she later discovered came from Ellis.
Ellis, who said she was left traumatized and required cosmetic surgery, had argued that the incident cost her both her job and her peace of mind. But the jury wasn’t convinced.
