Key Takeaways
- Lil Durk’s attorneys argue that Kavon “OTF Vonnie” Grant planned the alleged revenge attack on Quando Rondo that killed Saviay’a “Lul Pab” Robinson.
- The first week of testimony set off "snitch" talk online, with fans putting Durk in the same sentence as 6ix9ine and Gunna.
- But a lawyer arguing third-party guilt isn't a defendant cutting a deal. Collapsing the two narrows what rappers can safely do in court.
Lil Durk’s federal murder-for-hire trial is still in its early days, but we can already see the general shape of things.
The rapper’s attorney Marissa Goldberg gave an opening statement on Monday (August 24) that laid out the defense’s strategy: blame everything on Kavon “OTF Vonnie” Grant.
It was Grant, Goldberg argued, not her client Durk, who was behind the revenge attempts for the killing of King Von (who was Grant’s cousin)—revenge attempts that resulted in the fatal shooting of Saviay’a “Lul Pab” Robinson.
Grant was charged in the case even before Durk was, back in October, 2024. He has pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate, and is expected to testify later on. A different OTF affiliate who also plead guilty, Kacey “OTF Jam” Hester, took the stand on Wednesday. During his testimony, Jam testified that Lil Durk orchestrated the August 2022 shooting in Los Angeles intended to kill Quando Rondo, who was beefing with OTF. That shooting instead claimed the life of Lul Pab, who was Rondo’s cousin. Back on the stand Thursday, Hester said he felt bad for testifying against Durk. "I still got a lot of love for him. Blood was there for me,” he said. ”I feel bad. I know he probably hate me. I got love for him, I just don't have respect for him."
Head this way to read a breakdown of OTF Jam’s testimony.
Why are people calling Lil Durk a snitch?
The opening day reveal of Durk’s team’s defense got many people bringing up an extremely loaded word: snitching.
DJ Vlad responded to news of the defense strategy by calling out what he saw as hypocrisy. “[T]his the guy who called Gunna and 6ix9ine rats, but ended up doing the same thing when he was in their shoes,” he wrote. “It's easy to call someone a snitch when you're sitting in your mansion. When the shoe is on the other foot, and you're the one facing life in prison, your rules and values will change very quickly.”
Vlad is right about Durk’s previous statements. He did indeed say about Gunna, “That man told.” And Durk’s voluminous insulting of 6ix9ine—an outgrowth of the rainbow-haired rapper’s years-long beef with basically the entire city of Chicago—is well-known. He called 6ix9ine “a rat” for being a cooperating witness in a federal racketeering case.
But is Durk really engaging in hypocrisy? The need to label seemingly any attempt at defense “snitching” is not just confusing and a case of shifting definitions. It also shows a certain bloodthirstiness in fans and observers. After all, the term “snitch” is one that gets a lot of people very angry, and there are plenty of folks online and off who are explicit in their call for violence against anyone who meets the description.
A brief look at the cases of 6ix9ine, Gunna, and Durk reveal that they’re so wildly different that to use the same term to describe them is comical.
6ix9ine, of course, was a cooperating witness in his racketeering case. He testified for three straight days against two fellow gang members, laying out all of the crimes he and his fellow Nine Trey Bloods committed. (If you’re curious about the details, there’s a great book on the subject).
His defense against people accusing him of snitching, at the time and now, is that what he did isn’t snitching because one of the people he was testifying against, Anthony “Harv” Ellison, kidnapped and beat him, and other Nine Trey members mistreated him as well, stealing money from him and (he claims, though both the gang member and the woman mentioned have repeatedly denied this) sleeping with the mother of his oldest child.
Gunna, as anyone who was alive in 2022 knows, entered a type of plea deal called an Alford plea in the YSL case. It’s somewhere between admitting that you’re guilty and saying that you’re not: technically a guilty plea, but the defendant still asserts their innocence. Upon making the plea, in a carefully worded public statement, he said, “When I became affiliated with YSL in 2016, I did not consider it a ‘gang’; more like a group of people from metro Atlanta who had common interests and artistic aspirations.” But as part of his plea, he had to agree to statements about “YSL the gang.”
That was all it took to get online tongues wagging. Gunna never spoke to investigators, and never testified at the trial (per the terms of his deal, he would have been required to if he was asked, but there were never any plans for him to do so). But because of the phrasing in the plea, this idea of snitching stuck to him in some circles.
What those people either don’t know or find it inconvenient to admit is that the language of guilty pleas is always tightly controlled and specific. Prosecutors have certain things they need to hear, and not agreeing to say them—even in a pro forma, let’s-just-get-this-over-with-already way—can scuttle the whole thing. In fact, a defendant in the 6ix9ine case ran into problems during his guilty plea for this exact reason: he was reluctant to say what prosecutors wanted about specific code words his gang used. After a short conversation with his lawyer, he changed his mind.
What is Lil Durk's defense strategy?
Unlike Gunna, Durk is formulating a defense. Trials are, more than anything, battles of stories. Durk’s attorneys’ story appears at this point to be that Grant planned Robinson’s killing, got caught, and responded to prosecutors’ pressure for a “big fish” by falsely offering up Durk as the mastermind.
This is about as standard as a criminal defense gets. In every criminal trial that this writer has witnessed that has involved cooperating witnesses, their credibility is always attacked. Defense attorneys always tell the jury some version of, “Don’t believe this person. They’re lying, and the only reason they’re telling you this story is to stay out of prison.” It is a small leap from that to simply saying that the cooperator was behind everything. It’s a difference of degree, not kind.
Attaching the snitch term to Durk overlooks some other things as well. The most popular definitions of snitching (a notoriously slippery term) all revolve around the idea of incriminating other people in crimes that you committed as well. In this case, Durk’s argument is that he didn’t actually commit those crimes. He didn’t, his attorneys claim, pay anyone to shoot Quando Rondo, Saviay’a Robinson, or anyone else. Kavon Grant, they argue, was the one out for revenge.
What is a snitch?
Snitching can’t apply to all of these situation and remain a coherent term. It can’t be that you’re a snitch if
1. You commit crimes with people and then cooperate against them;
2. You don’t cooperate against anyone and maintain your innocence, but agree to some generic wording in your plea (while pushing right up to the line of saying you don’t actually agree with that wording);
3. You say you didn’t actually commit the crimes at issue at all, and that someone is falsely blaming you, while they’re the ones who did it.
If you think that all three of those examples are snitching, then all you as a rap fan are doing is ensuring that your favorite performer "beating a case” is now exponentially more difficult than it would be otherwise. One of the most common defenses is out because proclaiming your innocence while blaming someone else is snitching; pleading guilty in exchange for leniency is out because the language of your plea might admit to some wrongdoing that may theoretically implicate others, even if it applies to no one in particular; and, of course, cooperating in exchange for leniency, even against people who rob and exploit you, is also out because of a code of loyalty. If you believe this, you’re giving a very free hand to the hip-hop police in their surveillance of the culture. You’re also putting artists in danger.
And you are, in a very real way, acting just like the feds. One of the FBI’s tactics during COINTELPRO was something colloquially known as “snitch-jacketing,” which, per a Boston Globe article, “involved the FBI spreading false information that members of a targeted group were government informants in order to sow conflict within their membership.”
How different, really, is snitch-jacketing by the authorities from loose-lipped hip-hop fans and media applying the term “snitch” to anyone charged with a crime who doesn’t handle their case in exactly the way observers think is perfect?
All of this isn’t to say that the term “snitch” has no place in the hip-hop world. It’s good to be skeptical of law enforcement, and to not reflexively lend them a helping hand, especially in the heavily surveilled and policed world of hip-hop. It’s good, in most cases, to be loyal to your friends. But being cavalier about the word “snitch,” and applying it in any situation that doesn’t meet your standards, without knowing the full context: that’s the real danger. It’s an instinct that is going to get people hurt, and will result in more people in the rap world spending longer times behind bars.
So comment, if you want, about the various parties in United States of America versus Durk Banks and his codefendants. But be aware that words have consequences. And that people on all sides are watching.
