Before Travis Scott’s deposition on Monday, Astroworld plaintiffs’ attorneys (the victims and their families) filed an emergency motion last week to request phone records regarding the festival from Travis Scott, alleging that the rapper and his team had neglected to provide those records despite a court order requiring them to do so.
A court transcript acquired by Rolling Stone states that Scott’s lawyer claimed days before the deposition that the client’s phone went off a boat nearly two years ago and is now at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, getting all of those records may not be possible.
In the continuing legal lawsuit against the rapper for his 2021 Astroworld Festival, when ten people died and thousands more were hurt, a Scott lawyer referred to it. According to Rolling Stone, the plaintiffs’ attorneys have submitted a “emergency motion to compel production” of Scott’s phone and other items.
Scott’s lawyer, Steve Brody, reportedly stated at a hearing on September 15 that records from Scott’s manager, David Stromberg, who had “never turned his phone over” for imaging, could be provided by September 27, but getting Scott’s phone would be difficult. That’s because it “fell off a boat in January of 2022 and landed somewhere at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and is not able to be retrieved,”
Brody informed the judge. He continued by saying that Scott had not backed up his phone to iCloud and neither could they access the texts through Apple or Scott’s phone provider.
“Now, looking back, yeah, in an ideal world, his phone would have been imaged on November 6 or November 7 or November 8,” Brody admitted. “Or the 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, any time until it fell into the ocean in January of 2022,” added the shocked judge, Kristen Hawkins. Brody acknowledged that “in an ideal situation, that would have happened. It did not.”
How did Scott’s phone go to the ocean bottom, exactly? Two months after the festival, in January 2022, the rapper was in fact in Mexico. On January 14, Scott was seen leaving Cabo San Lucas, and in a subsequent interview, his producer Wheezy claimed that Scott had been working on his album Utopia there.
Scott’s team had fought off earlier attempts to get his phone, claiming it contained sensitive information and that the demand was unjustified. A large multi-district litigation combining hundreds of individual lawsuits is being brought against Scott and other festival participants. Police did not previously charge him with anything related to the fatalities and injuries.
Before Scott was interrogated for eight hours in a deposition on September 18, the phone revelation occurred. In order to prove their case, plaintiffs’ attorneys are now relying on Stromberg’s phone and messages, which, according to Brody, “show the vast majority, if not all, relevant texts with Mr. Scott related to this event.” After those messages have been examined, Scott will be questioned again in October.
