Cardi B. Picture: AFP/KENA BETANCUR
US rapper Cardi B surrendered to police in New York on Monday, charged with assault and reckless endangerment over an ugly brawl in a strip club that injured a female employee.
The 25-year-old star was in the Angels Strip Club in Queens on August 29 when someone in her group lobbed furniture inside the nightclub, causing an employee to suffer “some bruising to her legs,” police said.
The fast-rising rapper turned herself in at a Queens police station and was instructed to appear in criminal court on October 29, charged with one count of assault and two counts of reckless endangerment, police said.
Celebrity gossip website TMZ said she allegedly ordered an attack on two bartenders at the club, sisters who accuse her of harbouring a grudge because one of them slept with her husband, the rapper Offset.
Cardi, who was at the club because Offset was performing in the hard-living hip-hop trio Migos, allegedly told her group to attack the bartenders with bottles, chairs and a hookah smoking device, TMZ said.
On Monday, she was filmed exiting the police station in Queens, dressed in a beige skirt suit and white blouse, escorted by burly bodyguards into a waiting SUV, making no comment to a bevvy of cameras.
The singer, real name Belcalis Almanzar, is one of the most prominent women in hip-hop and shares a child with Offset. Earlier this year, she confirmed reports that the pair had secretly married.
Monday’s police booking comes just weeks after she was involved in a fracas with fellow rapper Nicki Minaj at New York Fashion Week in which Cardi B accused her rival of throwing a shoe at her.
Cardi B was photographed with a bump on her forehead. Minaj, one of the best-selling musical artists now performing and who was reportedly not hurt, declined to press charges.
The “I Like It” songstress later took to Instagram to imply that the older Minaj had questioned her parenting skills. She gave birth to a daughter, Kulture, in July.
Cardi B has become one of the biggest new stars in US music since the runaway success last year of her song “Bodak Yellow,” which touches on her former life making ends meet as a stripper.
A Bronx native, she is the first female rapper to have had multiple No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
She performed in New York on Saturday at the Global Citizen festival, an unofficial closing event following the weeklong United Nations General Assembly, in what was her first concert since giving birth.
She urged young people to pay attention ahead of the November 6 midterm elections, in which President Donald Trump’s Republican Party risks losing control of Congress.
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