‘What Gus had to live through is actually horrifying to me’
Lil Peep died in tragic circumstances in 2017, overdosing on a tour bus in Tucson, Arizona just hours before he was due to play a gig in the city. The promising young rapper was found by his manager, who was checking in on him in preparation for his performance that night. A medical examiner later identified the cause of death as a lethal concoction of Fentanyl and Xanax – now the artist's mother, Liza Womack, has filed a lawsuit against those she says should have been protecting him.
“This is something that I must do as a mother,” said Womack, who worries for young musicians like her son (born Gustav Åhr) and the way they are managed: “I feel very concerned that they not be exploited,” she said in a recent interview, “what Gus had to live through is actually horrifying to me, and I’m sure he’s not the only person his age in this situation.”
Filed to Los Angeles County Superior Court, the lawsuit claims that instead of helping Lil Peep with his addiction, the guiding figures in his team were pushing him “onto stage after stage in city after city,” and “plying and propping” him up with drugs during a period where he was visibly “stressed, overwhelmed, burnt out, exhausted and physically unwell”.
The suit seeks “unspecified damages for negligence, breach of contract and wrongful death” according to The New York Times and names Sarah Stennett, chief executive of First Access Entertainment (FAE) – the agency that oversaw Lil Peep’s career – and Belinda Mercer, who was brought on as a tour manager in late 2017. The pair are yet to respond to a request for comment from the paper at the time of writing.
Mercer is accused of supplying Lil Peep with substances including ketamine in the lawsuit, which also claims that Stennett and her company FAE “fostered, promoted and encouraged” the use of drugs and treated the young star “as a commodity rather than as a human being,” pushing him “to the extreme bounds of what somebody of his age and maturity level could handle emotionally, mentally, and physically.”
A documentary about Lil Peep called Everybody’s Everything premiered in March this year at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas and is due to be released in US cinemas November 15. A global release date is yet to be specified, but the film’s website states it will be: “available internationally in 2019”.
Watch the trailer below:
