Karol G
Felipe Orvi“When I’m traveling there’s a song that I sing a lot,” Karol G told her hometown of Medellin on Saturday (Dec. 4) during the first of two concerts at Estadio Atanasio Girardot. “It makes me feel very Colombian and I like to play it. I always said that I wanted to sing it when I was standing here.”
The reggaeton mega-star then encouraged the 40,000-plus on hand to take a drink before asking for one herself. And with a drink in one hand, an accordionist by her side, and the Colombian flag on the big screens behind her, Karol G belted out Patricia Teheran’s vallenato classic “Tarde Lo Conoci.”
The whole thing was “very Colombian,” as Karol G might say.
The flames, smoke, laser lights, and fireworks that amped up the concert — which launched at the Medellin soccer stadium at 11:20 p.m. — felt very much like Karol G. But this heartfelt rendition of “Tarde Lo Conoci” felt more like Carolina Giraldo. She was among friends and family and could be her true self. And that meant waving her internal Colombian flag.
“The tour was the best. Very cool,” Karol G said of the Bichota tour, which wraps up in Medellin on Sunday. “But from day one I’ve been waiting for this day.”
Karol G went from performing at any venue or party in Medellin that would accept a female singing reggaeton to headlining the city’s biggest venue with her all-female band on back-to-back nights. It’s a testament to the 30-year-old singer that on a night when her hometown was celebrating her sky-rocketing career, she chose to shine a light on up-and-coming Medellin talent.
Local reggaetoneros Agudelo 888, Blessd, and Ryan Castro opened the show. Fellow Medellin artists Yander & Yostin came out during Karol G’s performance to sing “Sola Es Mujer” with her. And that was followed by Castro returning to sing his hit “Jordan.”
Medellin’s own Feid had opened for Karol G on her two-month U.S. tour but was a not-so-surprise guest Saturday, joining Karol G to sing their new duet “Friky.” Karol G then gave Feid the stage to himself so Fercho could sing “Si Tu Supieras,” which had the audience chanting for more as he walked off stage.
There was no surprise appearance by Karol G’s frequent collaborator and former fiance Anuel AA like there was during her show in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Nov. 27. But their PDA-heavy music video for “Secreto” did play on the big screens as she performed hit, which topped Billboard‘s Latin Airplay chart. And she did talk about moving on from an ex during the night, which may or may not have been alluding to her breakup with Anuel.
“Sometimes we hold onto the past too much because it was happy, because it was a good time, because there was a lot of chemistry, right?” Karol G said during a pause in the love triangle anthem “A Ella.” “But when that ends, that ends. You have to let it go, right? The best part of letting go is you realize the best is yet to come.”
The show was heavy on choreography and at times left Karol G understandably sweaty and breathing heavy. If she was worried about having another mishap after falling down stairs on stage in Miami in late November, she didn’t show it. Karol G walked up and down those same stairs Saturday like she had done the entire tour. And in one of the more memorable moments of the night, she was raised on a small platform high above ground in the center of the stadium as she sang “Ocean.”
Karol G’s vocal coach during her late teen years told Billboard on Wednesday that she couldn’t have been prouder of the way her former student literally bounced back after the fall in Miami.
Mirabay Montoya used to meet with Karol G at 5 a.m. six days a week. There were times when Karol G would leave in tears, a result of her strict teaching style. Karol G’s father didn’t always approve of Montoya’s methods and, on one occasion, Karol G’s fellow students called her a savage.
“We would run 12 km as a warm-up to the lesson at a hill called the Volador,” Montoya recalled from her apartment in Medellin. “Carolina fell and bruised herself and the men went to pick her up. I told them not to: ‘One day she’s going to fall and nobody is going to pick her up. She has to pick herself up.’ That woman stood up and kept running.”
Montoya said seeing Karol G pick herself up in Miami just like she did on that steep hill in Medellin was the proudest she’s been of her former student.
“She stood up and continued on,” said an emotional Montoya, who attended Saturday’s show as Karol G’s guest. “Then in Puerto Rico the next day she stood in the arena and continued on. And then she’ll come (to Medellin) and she won’t stop.”
The last time Karol G toured in Medellin was when she performed at the smaller La Macarena as part of her 2019 Ocean tour. That meant she was singing many songs in front of her hometown crowd for the first time, including “Bichota,” “200 Copas,” a real crowd-pleaser Saturday, and “Tusa,” her biggest song to date.
The latter track — which spent four weeks at No. 1 on Hot Latin Songs — closed the show around 1:15 a.m. There was no encore, and there didn’t need to be. “Tusa” and the fireworks and streamers that accompanied it was the only exclamation point that this homecoming celebration needed.
“The coolest part is that I’m standing here and I’m from the same place that we’re all from,” Karol G said before performing “Tusa,” “Medellin, hijueputa!”
NEWS
Hip-hop producer Metro Boomin told jurors at his civil rape case on Wednesday that he had two consensual encounters with his accuser in 2016, always wore a condom, and couldn’t wait for his trial to start so he could testify and give his side.
“Were you wrongly accused?” his lawyer, Lawrence Hinkle, asked inside a federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles.
“Absolutely. I’ve been thinking about this day for a year,” the producer, whose legal name is Leland T. Wayne, told the jury. The influential producer, songwriter, and DJ said he found it “preposterous” that plaintiff Vanessa LeMaistre had accused him of raping her in a hotel without a condom in 2016 after handing her a drink that allegedly caused her to “black out.”
“I really don’t know where to start. This is crazy. I can’t even believe I’m up here doing this right now,” he said. “For her to accuse me of something like this, it’s something I could never fathom. I can’t even say what I think should happen to people who rape people.” Wayne testified that he lost his mother to domestic abuse and believes sexual abusers “should be tortured and killed.”
Asked point-blank if he ever sexually assaulted LeMaistre, he said, “Absolutely not.” Asked again minutes later, he said, “No way in the world.”
Wayne, 32, took the witness stand as his friend and fellow Atlanta-based artist Young Thug watched in the courtroom gallery. “I’m just here to support him,” Young Thug told Rolling Stone as he walked into the courthouse during the lunch break. “He’s a longtime friend.”
Earlier on Wednesday, LeMaistre finished her own testimony in the case, telling jurors she was still reeling from the recent loss of her newborn son in 2016 when she visited Wayne at a Los Angeles recording studio after ingesting half of a Xanax. She said Wayne handed her a shot that she sipped shortly before she passed out. LeMaistre said she later found herself drifting in and out of consciousness in a hotel room with Wayne on top of her, penetrating her vaginally and then performing oral sex on her. When she finally woke up completely hours later, Wayne allegedly ushered her out of a side door and pointed her to a car that returned her to the studio to retrieve her car, she testified.
“I was confused,” she told jurors of her immediate reaction. She said she didn’t go to the police right away or confront Wayne because she was still processing what happened. “It was very foggy for me waking up the next day,” she explained.
LeMaistre, who was 30 when she first met a 22-year-old Wayne in Las Vegas earlier that year, testified that she spoke about the alleged assault with a mental health professional she was seeing at a treatment center called Prototypes in the fall of 2016. She later discussed it with professionals again when she called a pair of rape hotlines in 2024, she said.
“Having lost my son, and the defendant assaulting me, have been the two, by far, worst things I’ve ever experienced in my life. It has been excruciatingly painful,” LeMaistre said on the witness stand. “This stole the past nine years of my life. I haven’t been able to have any healthy relationships. I want to get married one day.”
During a fierce cross-examination by Wayne’s other lawyer, Justin H. Sanders, LeMaistre defended a series of handwritten notes she wrote that were turned over to the defense in discovery. In journal entries dated June 14, 2017, LeMaistre used two different pen colors as she authored what appeared to be a conversation with someone named “Chrisie.” “All of it was me just self-soothing,” she testified.
“When should I hit back Metro?” she wrote in the journal. “Will I sleep with him again?” Then switching to Chrisie’s voice, she wrote, “Yes, and it will be beautiful, great, amazing.” Asked what she meant by “again,” LeMaistre said “technically” she already had slept with Wayne, but “the conditions were rape.”
Sanders then turned to notes LeMaistre wrote during a 2024 trip to Peru, where she engaged in an extended “Ayahuasca ceremony,” a spiritual ritual involving the ingestion of a psychoactive plant used by indigenous cultures in the Amazon. In the notes titled “Plan Ayahuasca Gave Me,” LeMaistre wrote that she intended to “blow the whistle on Metro Boomin.” She also wrote that she planned to contact the law firm that singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura used to sue music mogul Sean Combs, and further planned to publish her “date rape” allegations in a post on social media. “We’re asking for 3.4 million to 3.7 million,” she wrote in her sometimes admittedly illegible handwriting.
“That was the number given to me,” Le Maistre testified about the amounts. Asked if she meant that the numbers were “given” to her during the Ayahuasca ceremony, she said, “Correct.”
With eight jurors listening intently, LeMaistre said that when she first heard the Wayne-produced song “Rap Saved Me” in 2017, she believed the lyrics were about her. In the chorus, artists 21 Savage and Offset rap, “She took a Xanny, then she fainted. I’m from the gutter, ain’t no changing. From the gutter, rap saved me. She drive me crazy, have my baby.”
LeMaistre also testified that she found out she was pregnant after visiting a Planned Parenthood in late 2016. As Sanders walked her through her medical records from Planned Parenthood, he showed jurors forms listed her last menstrual cycle had been on Oct. 1, 2016, and her “most recent unprotected sexual intercourse” as having been on Oct. 13, 2016. She denied experiencing any instances of “coercion” or intimate partner violence, the medical records said. Another record dated Nov. 7, 2016, said the gestational age of the fetus was five weeks and two days. LeMaistre, who had a non-surgical abortion to end the pregnancy, later contacted Planned Parenthood on Feb. 10, 2025, asking to amend the reported dates in her records and remove her “denial of coercion.”
“You knew when you tried to change those records that it was the only way you could make your story stick,” Sanders challenged LeMaistre. “You had to change the dates of the last unprotected sex, correct?” Sanders asked. LeMaistre denied the allegation. Sanders appeared to be suggesting that LeMaistre wanted to link her pregnancy to Wayne because it would support her claims that Wayne had unprotected sex with her and a reason to allegedly pen the lyrics “have my baby.”
In his own testimony, Wayne said he “never” has sex without a condom because he’s not ready to be a father. “Even at that time, my high school sweetheart and I were still using condoms. There was no way this girl I just met in Las Vegas, that I had unprotected sex with her,” he testified.
Asked if there was any truth to the allegation he personally authored or even “suggested” the cited lyrics in “Rap Saved Me,” Wayne replied, “None whatsoever. I just made the beat.”
While LeMaistre was the sole witness for her entire case, Wayne called a clinical psychologist to the stand to testify about her assessment of the plaintiff. Dr. April Thames, chief psychologist at UCLA’s Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, told jurors that she reviewed LeMaistre’s medical records and conducted her own 90-minute to two-hour exam with the plaintiff. She said she personally diagnosed LeMaistre with “borderline personality disorder with psychotic features.” Under cross-examination, she admitted that LeMaistre had not formally received that diagnosis before, though she previously had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder.
Both sides rested their cases on Wednesday afternoon. Closing arguments are set for Thursday.
