The lawsuits have already started. Travis Scott, Drake and Live Nation are all being named in lawsuits by the people injured in the deadly Astroworld debacle last Friday. The melee left eight people dead and hundreds injured. Travis Scott cancelled the next Astroworld festival and he’s refunding all of the ticket money, plus he’s pledged to pay for all of the funeral costs. I would imagine his lawyers are encouraging him to settle with families as quickly as possible. Travis issued two statements over the weekend, but his co-headliner Drake didn’t say anything. Until late last night, when he posted a statement on Instagram.
Drake, who made a surprise appearance with Travis Scott at Astroworld 2021 in Houston, released his first public statement on Monday night regarding the November 5 tragedy. Eight people died and many others were injured at the event.
“I’ve spent the past few days trying to wrap my mind around this devastating tragedy,” Drake wrote. “I hate resorting to this platform to express an emotion as delicate as grief but this is where I find myself. My heart is broken for the families and friends of those who lost their lives and for anyone who is suffering. I will continue to pray for all of them, and will be of service in any way I can, May God be with you all.”
Drake’s statement follows some words shared by Scott in the aftermath of the event. “I’m absolutely devastated by what took place last night,” Travis Scott said in his initial statement on November 6. “My prayers go out to the families and all those impacted by what happened at Astroworld Festival.” In a subsequent Instagram story video (viewed by Pitchfork) he said that he was “working right now to identify the families so we can help assist them through this tough time.”
Both Scott and Drake have been sued over Astroworld 2021. Scott has promised that all tickets from the event will be refunded and has said that he plans to cover funeral costs for those who died at the festival.
Drake talked to his lawyers before he and his publicist crafted that statement, you can tell. Just like you could tell that Travis either didn’t talk to his lawyers or he didn’t care what they said. Travis feels guilty, as he should, because he didn’t do enough to help people and stop the melee. Drake is looking out for his bottom line – expressing sympathy, but telegraphing the fact that he doesn’t feel responsible for what happened.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid.
He’s too busy preying on underage girls in Toronto to respond
Drake!??….this is News!
yep he was widely shamed a few years back for striking up sus “friendships” with Millie Bobby Brown and Billy Eilish that looked a lot like grooming, and he’s dated / hooked up with teenagers :S
My daughter has known about this for years.
This is not new. I hate his vibe since that. Millie was something like 16 years old. Was does a dude his age have in common with a girl so young to have regular calls to chitchat? gross. gross. gross.
Does Travis feel guilty though? He didn’t seem to feel guilty after that guy was paralyzed in 2017 or after he told a mob to beat the hell out of a fan for taking off his shoe in 2015…
Dude is a predator. He should be cancelled.
There’s insurance for things like this. It’s not out of pocket for the performers or any personal liability.
Funeral expenses and personal outreach are probably paid for by performers.
Insurance probably requires proper security, crowd control, and medical provisions to be in place — which clearly were not. So that could throw the responsibility back on the producers / artists. Or even the city, since it also has a responsibility to monitor and safeguard the event. I’m sure Drake and Travis Scott are terrified of lawsuits right now.
And all those event vendors and providers would be insured for this as well. It’s a shared risk.
Stories are now coming out about the people who were injured, and it ain’t good. A 9yo boy is in a medically induced coma after suffering damages to his organ. A 22 yo woman in college is on a ventilator in critical condition. We have to assume that with hundreds injured, these aren’t the only ones still fighting for their lives, and that the final death toll is going to go up.
A lot of the first-hand accounts I’ve read are also conjecturing that more than 8 people died on the scene. So there are either more dead who haven’t been identified yet, or enough injuries that are severe enough that people on the scene thought they had died. This is so horrible.
So horrible
Travis and Drake need to say the words “I am sorry”. It’s not going to kill them to say “mistakes were made and I was one of the people making mistakes that night. I should have been more vigilant about my fans’ safety and I am sorry”.
Like would it kill them? All they say is they are devastated. How about an apology that you were one part of a giant breakdown of safety protocols that led to a complete tragedy?
Any decent lawyer would 100% advise against that. It could be used against them in a lawsuit.
I understand your sentiment morally, but legally they’re probably better off not saying they made a mistake/take responsibility and that’s why they’re not saying it. They’ve been advised by lawyers not to admit fault. Especially since lawsuits have already been filed.
The stories that continue to come out of this event are just horrific. I think the death toll will be much higher than 8 when all is said and done. Stories from concertgoers and now medics saying there were people all around with no pulse, face down in the ground for 10+ minutes before getting medical attention.
One of the videos I saw was a group of people chanting “stop the show” and you can hear a man say something like “a guy died right there five songs ago and he’s still there.” Where was security? Where was anyone?? I’ve never been to a festival that didn’t have security circulating. I can’t imagine going five songs without anyone being able to find the guy help!
Well the proof of how they actually finished their set at 10:15 when event organizers decided to call it quits at 9:38 is out there. There is video of the crowds chanting to end the concert, people climbing on stage asking for help, Kylie and Kendall being snuck out of the event walking by people being worked on. They all need to go down for this.
I’m surprised their no story about how the first lawsuit for Travis and other in charge of the event has been filled.
It’s in the first two sentences.
I meant make a separate post about it and all the other information and videos that came out.
Sorry, maybe I’m ignorant about how these things work, but I don’t fully understand how Travis Scott and Drake are at fault for this. Aren’t they just the talent? Isn’t capacity and safety and security the job of the venue and organisers? Or is this like OVO and Drake is the organiser? Of course.. OF COURSE… they should feel remorse about people dying at their concert but I don’t fully understand why we are looking at the artists and not the people who put 40 thousand people in a concert hall without ensuring their safety.
There are dozens upon dozens of video examples of artists stopping shows when they identify someone struggling in the crowd or in need of medical attention. No, it is not SOLELY the performers’ responsibility, but there’s significant reason to believe Travis heard the people shouting to stop the show (he said no, this is what you signed up for), screaming for help, saw an ambulance struggling to get through the crowd, and continued encouraging people to act crazy when he could’ve simply asked for everyone to back up and give each other room to breathe.
Astroworld is Travis’ event in cooperation with LiveNation.
If you are going to have an opinion, please read the news, watch the videos. There is no question as to how Travis encouraged and incited the crowd, and continued playing despite seeing the ambulance and people being crushed. So please stop with the innocent questioning of how poor Travis and Drake shouldn’t be responsible.
Ok. I’ve watched the videos. This venue is not safe, but Travis Scott is also responsible for inciting wildly unsafe behaviour and not calling it when it got bad.
I am sorry for my ignorance.
There is also a lot of footage from Travis’s past shows surfacing where he encourages chaos and even violence. One of the videos I saw he was in the crowd on someones shoulders and he reaches down and hits one of his fans really hard. If you look at his instagram posts promoting Astroworld, he’s all about dystopia. In retrospect the promos + his chaos encouragement are really unnerving.
I agree with Mika.
Drake is a predator and I have no time for him. I think that Travis Scott was callous and that callousness enabled violence. BUT the venue and all organisers need to be held responsible. Because that dramatically diminishes the likelihood of this tragedy happening again.
Like if Travis Scott is known for inciting violence than only hire him if he promises not to do so and you have staff onstage to enforce that promise.
You can hold the venue & organisers accountable without diminishing the personal responsibility of the individual performers involved.
I believe they’re all at fault, Travis Scott included and Drake to a lesser extent. Obviously, the majority of the blame should be on the organizers like Live Nation (although Travis was also listed as an event organizer or producer, I believe).
But Travis looked on and continued performing for 37 minutes after it was declared a ‘mass casualty event’. People were being trampled and crushed to death, screaming for help and being carried out of the crowd unconscious and he just kept going. It’s all on video, in the official Apple Music stream and in all of the firsthand accounts on Twitter and tik tok. At one point it looked like 2 of Travis’s people came out onstage to alert him of what’s happening and he shooed them away and said “y’all know what you came here to do”. As the performer, he has a responsibility to manage the crowd and their energy during the show. He failed to do that and now 9 people are dead and hundreds more injured. On top of that, he’s been arrested twice for inciting violence at his shows in the past.
Performers have stopped shows for much less. We all saw the video, he didn’t even stop singing while an unconscious fan was being pulled out right in front of him. I’m so tired of people making excuses for Travis, he is absolutely at fault for this. It wasn’t just him, but he’s definitely not completely blameless. Sorry for the rant, it’s just so frustrating.
Travis was watching the whole thing. He had a birds eye view of it.he saw it. I have seen several videos online that show him looking right on as someone is being carried out. He did not leave. He started droning and chanting and was almost in a trance…but he was watching it for sure. And people were yelling to stop the show but he didnt. It all feels like some gross satanic ritual. I dont know but this whole thing smells very fishy.
Droning and chanting? You mean… singing? Give me a break. Please stop this “satanic ritual” foolishness. This was a tragedy and unchecked greed and capitalism are to blame.
Well all i can say is that I saw 2 different videos and he was watching the whole thing. He knew. As someone who has been in the concert industry for many years, I know for a fact that security and the artists are always in communication. So either he is blind and cant see or he is just a POS that deserves zero platform at all, You are right,,, it is a absolute tragedy. And I would never minimize such a thing, It seemed so disgusting to me that he’d be up there above the crowd with a birds eye view looking directly at the crowd where the people were being carried out and not STOP the show; Either he has the worst security in all of history or hes a sick man that needs to go get some serious help. If you see the flyer for his show, its so gross. He should be cancelled.
Yeah, it sure seems like he should have had enough of an inkling from his vantage point to know it was a dangerous situation. We know that he knew at least one person was unconscious and heard the crowd saying to stop the show. But no, I’m not really worried about a flyer with some eyeballs on it. Focus please.
I’ve seen that video. I think the “droning and chanting” is simply BS auto tune and a douche who doesn’t give a sh-t about people being hurt.
Lisa it reminded me of some evil ritual too! Not satanic though
I wish people would stop saying, “8 people were killed.” It’s, “8 people INCLUDING CHILDREN!”
Thank you! There should be ZERO deaths at a concert, especially as this was not the result of unforeseeable events like a pyrotechnic accident or live shooter…this was the result of an artist who has history of being so “badass” he thinks “raging”/overriding concert security and getting injured are rites of passages at his shows. Encouraging a packed crowd to rush the stage is about as dumb and complicit as you can get when an accident of this scale ensues.
Travis doesn’t feel guilty and nothing about his actions even demonstrate that he feels remorse. While his statement doesn’t sound like it was crafted by lawyers, it was definitely crafted by Kris(her 2 youngest daughters and grandchild was there), who took the opportunity to use the tragedy to promote her daughter’s second pregnancy. 8 people died(according to witness accounts it may be more than 8 people), but all that matters is that her pregnant daughter who eye witnesses reported was surrounded by security guards made it out ok!
Apart from the overcrowding and disorganisation I’ve seen countless Tik Tok vids of kids (regular Travis concert goers among them) saying something was ‘off’ describing the energy as ‘bad/insidious ‘. A series of sounds (I wouldn’t call it music) were played very loudly for 7 hours then intensified before the performance at a frequency of 19hz called the ‘fear frequency’ (google fear frequency astroworld and click on the Tik Tok vid in Twitter ) It’s an infrasonic frequency usually used for raves to hype up the crowd but has physical side effects like discomfort, dizziness, hyperventilation, fear and panic attacks. Variants of Infrasonic frequency was used in Guantanamo Bay and the Nazis for torture. That coupled with the dark dystopian imagery and themes within his music. The song ‘Antidote’ alludes to human trafficking (girls in cages) with Travis boasting he’s so ‘on fire’ people think he’s Satan. He clearly ignored their pleas to stop the show. These kids came to this conclusion based on these factors.
Tin foil hat post
Simple fact: occult symbolism has been used by the music industry consistently since Black Sabbath days.
@ASHLEY you obviously don’t know how frequencies work. Frequencies effects on water have been scientifically proven by Dr Masaru Emoto. We are made up of mostly water. SZA left after her performance that day feeling ill. I believe those kids. @Jules occult symbolism is everywhere now not just in rock bands it’s EVERYWHERE. All of fashion, Children’s TV rap and pop videos everything on YouTube it’s overt now you can’t deny that.