Cardi B pleads guilty to assault charges: ’I’ve made some bad decisions’
The rapper has avoided jail time by entering a plea deal over the strip club fight
Cardi B has pleaded guilty to assault charges related to a fight at a New York strip club in 2018.
The rapper has accepted a plea deal ahead of a trial this week, which means that she now avoids imprisonment. Cardi B has been charged with third-degree assault and second-degree reckless endangerment, and sentenced to 15 days of community service.
Additionally, the rap star has been ordered to stay away from the women who were involved for three years and must also pay their court fees.
Prosecutors claimed that Cardi threw objects, including champagne bottles, at two sisters who were bartenders at the Angels Strip Club in Flushing, Queens while also ordering her entourage to attack them. Allegedly, the fight erupted from Cardi believing that one of the woman was having an affair with her husband, Offset of Migos fame.
“Part of growing up and maturing is being accountable for your actions,” Cardi wrote in a statement. “As a mother, it’s a practice that I am trying to instill in my children, but the example starts with me.
“I’ve made some bad decisions in my past that I am not afraid to face and own up to. These moments don’t define me and they are not reflective of who I am now. I’m looking forward to moving past this situation with my family and friends and getting back to the things I love the most – the music and my fans.”
The Queens district attorney Melinda Katz said after the sentencing: “No one is above the law.”
Cardi was accompanied by two co-defendants, Jeffrey Bush and Tawana Jackson-Morel. Bush has been sentenced to six months in jail for his part in the assault. Ten other charges related to the assault were dismissed.
If the rapper fails to complete the community service by January 2023 then she would face jail time.
Meanwhile, a new album from Cardi is in the works four years after her multi-platinum debut ‘Invasion of Privacy’.
At the beginning of 2020, she told fans that she was “going away for a very long time” to work on the album, although she has continued to steadily appear on singles in the intervening months, which includes her smash hit collaboration with Megan Thee Stallion, ‘WAP’.
An update shared to Instagram in January affirmed that she remains at work on the album, with a brief clip that showed her in what she described as a “ghetto-ass studio”, with what appeared to be a modest recording setup visible.
Since then, she’s gone on to tell fans that she is experiencing “technical difficulties” with the new record, in a voice note posted to Twitter. The album is still expected to be released in 2022.