LOS ANGELES (AP) — Rapper Tory Lanez has sued the California prison system, saying he by no means ought to have been housed with a fellow inmate who stabbed him 16 times final 12 months.
Lanez, 33, whose authorized identify is Daystar Peterson, filed the federal lawsuit looking for $100 million in damages on Tuesday towards the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the warden and guards on the prison in Tehachapi the place he was being held.
The swimsuit says he was stabbed 16 times within the again, torso, head and face in an “unprovoked life-threatening attack” by inmate Santino Casio, who used a selfmade “shank.” Lanez had a collapsed lung and needed to be airlifted to a hospital, it says.
Lanez is serving a 10-year sentence for shooting hip-hop star (*16*) within the ft after a dramatic and high-profile 2022 trial in Los Angeles.
Prison officers say he was attacked May 12, 2025, by Casio, who’s serving a life sentence for second-degree homicide and first-degree tried homicide. Casio had one other 2008 conviction for assault by a prisoner with a lethal weapon and one other in 2018 for manufacturing a lethal weapon.
“The choice to house Casio with Peterson was known or should have been a known danger,” the lawsuit says. It alleges that correctional officers’ response was sluggish, and no particular measures like flash grenades or smoke bombs had been used to cease Casio. It says the establishment housed the lads collectively regardless of the rapper’s “high-profile celebrity status,” which made him a goal.
There is not any file of Casio being charged within the assault. An legal professional who represented him beforehand didn’t reply to messages looking for remark on the time.
Lanez was transferred to a different prison, the California Men’s Colony, in San Luis Obispo County.
The lawsuit additionally says the defendants unlawfully seized his songbooks with unpublished lyrics which can be of nice future industrial worth and refused to return them.
In response to a request for remark, Department of Corrections spokesperson Ike Dodson stated the company doesn’t touch upon pending litigation.
The lawsuit was first reported by TMZ.
Lanez was convicted of three felonies in December 2022: assault with a semiautomatic firearm; having a loaded, unregistered firearm in a automobile; and discharging a firearm with gross negligence.
A California court docket rejected his appeal in November.
Megan, whose authorized identify is Megan Pete, testified at trial that in July 2020, after they left a celebration at Kylie Jenner’s Hollywood Hills house, Lanez fired the gun in the back of her ft and shouted for her to bop as she walked away from an SUV by which they’d been using.
She had bullet fragments surgically removed from both feet. It was not till months after the incident that she publicly recognized Lanez as the one that fired the gun.
The 32-year-old Canadian Lanez started releasing mixtapes in 2009 and noticed a gradual rise in recognition, shifting on to main label albums, two of which reached the highest 10 on Billboard’s charts.
