Workplace troubles. Emilio Garcia, a former photographer for Megan Thee Stallion is filing a lawsuit against the artist. The ex-employee filed the lawsuit in Los Angeles County on Tuesday, April 23, 2024, saying that he was subjected to a hostile work environment and harassment.
In the lawsuit, Garcia alleged that he was trapped inside a moving vehicle with the hip-hop star in a foreign country while she had sex with a woman. According to the lawsuit, he was unable to get out of the moving car, and would have been in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country even if he was able. Garcia was “embarrassed, mortified and offended throughout the whole ordeal,” the lawsuit states.
Garcia said that the “WAP” rapper told him “don’t ever discuss what you saw,” and berated, fat-shamed, and treated him differently after the instance. The “harassment was so severe or pervasive” that it created a “hostile, abusive work environment” that made Garcia’s “working conditions intolerable,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit also claims that Garcia was working “during all waking hours of the day,” and suddenly switched to a “pay-per-task” invoicing system that “significantly” cut his salary. He states that the “toxic work environment” left him with “mounting anxiety, depression, and physical distress.”
Who is Emilio Garcia?
Emilio Garcia is a photographer, who was employed with Megan Thee Stallion from 2020 to 2023. “I felt uncomfortable,” the camera operator told NBC News about the situation. “I was kind of frozen, and I was shocked. At kind of just the overall audacity to do this right, right beside me.”
“To hear someone who advocates about loving your body tell me these things. I felt degraded,” he continued. “What I learned throughout the years is that, especially coming from an from an office environment, is you know, there’s no HR department in the entertainment business. So if you don’t know that you’re being done wrong, you don’t really know how to advocate for yourself until you start asking maybe you start asking your peers who have representation, they have agents, they have management, they have attorney. So I just really just want to encourage people to advocate for themselves.”
Garcia’s lawyer Ron Zambrano, a partner and Employment Litigation Chair at West Coast Employment Lawyers in Los Angeles, said in a statement: “Megan just needs to pay our client what he’s due, own up to her behavior and quit this sort of sexual harassment and fat shaming conduct. Emilio should never have been put in a position of having to be in the vehicle with her while she had sex with another woman. ‘Inappropriate’ is putting it lightly. Exposing this behavior to employees is definitely illegal.”
Megan Thee Stallion’s response to lawsuit
Megan Thee Stallion hasn’t commented on the lawsuit, but her lawyer made a statement to Page Six. “This is an employment claim for money — with no sexual harassment claim filed and with salacious accusations to attempt to embarrass her,” Megan’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, told “Page Six.” “We will deal with this in court.
