The personal photographer to one of America’s most provocative rap stars has said she created a “hostile working environment” by having sex with a woman in front of him while they were travelling in a car together.
Emilio Garcia said the incident took place while he was inside a moving vehicle with Megan Thee Stallion in Ibiza. The 29-year-old singer allegedly told Mr Garcia following the incident “don’t ever discuss what you saw”.
In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Mr Garcia accused the singer, whose real name is Megan Pete, of harassment, including a campaign of bullying over his weight.
The “harassment was so severe or pervasive” that it created a “hostile, abusive work environment” that made Garcia’s “working conditions intolerable”, the suit said.
Megan Thee Stallion said that the accusations against her were “salacious” and that Mr Garcia was using them to extort money from her.
“This is an employment claim for money – with no sexual harassment claim filed and with salacious accusations to attempt to embarrass her. We will deal with this in court,” Alex Spiro, an attorney for the singer, said on Tuesday.
The lawsuit states that Mr Garcia travelled with Megan Thee Stallion to Ibiza in June 2022 and that after a night out he was with her and three other women in an SUV when the singer began having sex with one of the other women.
“I felt uncomfortable. I was kind of frozen, and I was shocked. At … the overall audacity to do this right, right beside me,” Mr Garcia told NBC News in an interview.
Mr Garcia began working for the star in 2018 as a personal cameraman. In 2019, he quit his job to work with Megan Thee Stallion full-time and did so until June 2023.
Fat-shamed
During his employment, Mr Garcia is said to have been berated and fat-shamed by the Grammy winner.
She allegedly called him a “fat b—-” and told him to “spit out your food” and “you don’t need to be eating”.
“To hear someone who advocates about loving your body tell me these things,” Garcia said in the interview. “I felt degraded.”
Once the pair returned from the trip, Mr Garcia said that his pay structure was changed from a monthly flat rate to a pay-per-task system in which he was required to submit invoices for each assignment, according to the lawsuit.
“What I learned throughout the years is that, especially coming from an office environment, is … there’s no HR department in the entertainment business,” Garcia told NBC News.
“So if you don’t know that you’re being done wrong, you don’t really know how to advocate for yourself … I just really just want to encourage people to advocate for themselves.”
Megan Thee Stallion has recently been forced to remove a post promoting her Hot Girl Summer tour on Instagram because it was “too sexy”.
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