The FADER talked to Thug superfan turned DIY legal observer @ThuggerDaily about the recent flood of leaked jail recordings from the YSL trial.
Young Thug is in damage control mode. The first shot across the bow was a previously leaked 2015 interrogation of the Atlanta rapper. It was seen as Thug trolling detectives when it first emerged in November 2023; now, it’s being portrayed as the rapper collaborating with authorities during the RICO trial against his rap label YSL. This was soon followed by a steady stream of leaked jail calls where Thug speaks incredibly bluntly on friends and foes alike. The criticism got so intense that Thug attempted to clear the air over the weekend with a three-and-a-half hour interview — easily one of the longest of his career — on the podcast Perspektives with Bank.
Most of the alleged calls are simply the latest in a series of tabloid-fattening leaks. In them, Thug purportedly discusses his hatred for Gunna, purchasing streams for DS4 and Business Is Business, alleges Scooter Braun attempted to buy Lil Baby out of his deal before HYBE purchased Quality Control Music in 2023, and insults everyone from QCM CEO Coach P (a “rat”) and Kendrick Lamar (for pulling a verse from Thug’s album and hilariously, never posting on Instagram) to collaborators including Migos, Lil Durk, Lil Baby and long-time producer Wheezy (“He always been stupid and r*tarded”). In one conversation, 21 Savage defends Gunna to Thug by pointing out that Thug encouraged his brother Unfoonk to take the same plea deal as Thug’s one-time right hand.
Young Thug superfan turned DIY legal observer @ThuggerDaily doesn’t question the authenticity of the recordings. “I had been sent them a long time ago by random fans,” he tells me over DM. When it comes to the details of the YSL RICO trial, no one has been more dedicated: the anonymous user managing the account has been publicly covering the trial every day since December 2022, though he started sifting through court docs even earlier, breaking down the case for “a group chat of a bunch of Young Thug fans,” who encouraged him to publish his findings to combat social media misinformation.
“In the time period where I started this account, media interest in the case fell very low,” Thugger Daily says. “The case was too long and complicated which made it very hard to follow, and much of it was boring, so not worth the money of paying a reporter to be there 8 hours a day [and] the case wasn’t being streamed at this point either.”
Thugger Daily ended up finding the private Zoom link for court proceedings accidentally copied on a public filing, making the account, for a while, the public’s de facto window into trial proceedings. The account’s consistent coverage and plain language interpretations of legalese buoyed his profile, to the point that lawyers and defendants were comfortable vetting information at the source when fellow journalists couldn’t corroborate a tip.
Thugger Daily’s coverage of the trial has earned him plaudits from The New Yorker, who labeled him the trial’s Joseph Pulitzer, and legal reporter turned hip-hop internet heavyweight Meghann Cuniff. That shouldn’t be misinterpreted as a lack of bias: following an uncharacteristic apology from Young Thug to GloRilla on Thursday afternoon, Thugger Daily offered to leak some positive calls to help shift the narrative. Still, you’d be hard pressed to find a more knowledgeable expert to help break down everything going on with Young Thug right now.
Thug has spent much of the past week on social media attempting to refute snitch allegations (“I tried to free my mans[…]”) and taunting his haters/burning bridges (“All yall new junkies in [Lil Durk’s label] otf, just know I’m the one sent Brian steel to help [Durk, who faces murder-for-hire charges] on my dime”). No big surprise, given his hard-nosed anti-rat rhetoric following the YSL trial and his occasional public spats with artists like Future (“Boy slow down dropping all that BS music” belongs in the MoMA). Thugger Daily diplomatically declines to comment on the contents of these calls, saying in part, “I think posting them is messed up, but it is what it is.”
Over the weekend, Thug retweeted one of the account’s posts defending the rapper, which Thugger Daily took as an endorsement of his authority on the court case (“definitely a cool feeling”). The FADER caught up with Thugger Daily on Wednesday to discuss Thug’s jailhouse interrogation footage and how YSL fans are responding to the snitching allegations.
The FADER: Could you tell our readers a little about when you started covering the YSL trial and when you finished coverage?
@ThuggerDaily: I took over this page in December 2022, it had around 1000 followers. This was about 7 months after the RICO indictment, right in the middle of the first batch of co-defendants taking guilty pleas.
I’d say you could say I finished a couple of weeks ago with the conclusion of the civil side of the RICO case (forfeiture case regarding seizing Young Thug’s property), but there’s always little loose ends I’ll be following.
Such as people fighting to get their probation revocations overturned, the state possibly appealing the civil case, Young Thug and others asking for probation terms to be modified, etc.
I was looking back at some of your interviews from last spring, and I saw that you started tweeting about the case with Slimelife Shawty’s December 2022 plea. This was around the same time as Gunna’s Alford plea; other defendants like Tick and DK took plea deals as well. Can you tell me a little bit about how those deals were interpreted at the time? From your perspective, did fans really feel like they were “snitching?”
Yes, the headlines from blogs [were] immediately that these defendants agreed to provide evidence against Young Thug and the other defendants. It felt like Young Thug was cooked because some of the most key people in the case (Thug’s closest friends, a YSL co-founder, and a couple of people with very serious allegations in the indictment) were the ones taking these pleas.
It was a dark time. When the smoke cleared, it became apparent that from a legal perspective, this only applied to a handful of the pleas — not all of them. The debates still went on for years. The optics were terrible and the state was dominating the narrative.
With the reignited convo, there’s been a re-released video of Thug’s interrogation by police, and it seems like the interpretation of that footage has shifted dramatically.
My take on that is I don’t think the majority of people actually think Thug is a rat based off that video, but fans felt there’s been a bit of a double standard by the media. The narrative is being led by people who fell out with Thug or have been labeled rats by [the] media. And it doesn’t help that Thug himself has been so vocally against rats the entire time he’s been back home.
There have also been a bunch of alleged leaked jail calls. In your estimation, are these calls authentic? What should we make of them?
Certainly authentic, I had been sent them a long time ago by random fans so they’ve been floating around. It was a ticking time bomb that they’d inevitably leak. I tried to avoid commenting about them because they are private conversations, stripped of context, in an emotionally vulnerable state. I think posting them is messed up, but it is what it is.
We don’t have to get into the particulars, but a lot of those calls are being selectively clipped or presented in certain ways — you posted yesterday about how Kendrick Lamar was backing out of a previously-agreed feature, not leaving Thug on read. Are there any other specific misrepresentations/misinterpretations of info that stood out to you over the past week or so?
Most of the calls being posted are attempting to get in the middle of Thug’s relationships with other people, so it’s not really something [I] have anything to say about, I really don’t feel it’s my place at all.
I also wanted to ask your opinion on his recent music, both officially released and leaked, as a fan of Thug’s since “Hercules” and SS3.
As a fan, I’m disappointed in the lack of releases since the trial. It felt like he had a moment to capitalize on and he just … didn’t. I get after going though something like that, you may have different priorities but can’t help but feel like that as a fan.
That said, for his few releases (2 guest verses and one single), fans were really hoping to hear more about Thug’s thoughts and feelings regarding everything he’s been going through but Thug has largely been avoiding that. His upcoming feature on Lil Baby’s album is an exception to that, and [the snippet] had fans really excited. But it’s unclear if plans have changed with everything going on — Thug teased like he was going to drop something himself soon.
Sound-wise, I’ve heard some promising snippets and other snippets I really don’t care for (rage beats). So I’ll have to wait and see what he actually puts out.