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Megan Thee Stallion, rapper, now Broadway star, and hottest woman you have ever seen in your boring little life, posted on her Instagram on Saturday evening that she and her boyfriend, Dallas Mavericks whatever Klay Thompson, had broken up. “Cheating, had me around your whole family playing house,” she wrote, “now you don’t know if you can be ‘monogamous’????” Immediately after, she gave a statement to TMZ that was even more cutting than the one she had posted herself. “I’ve made the decision to end my relationship with Klay,” she said. “Trust, fidelity and respect are non-negotiable for me in a relationship, and when those values are compromised, there’s no real path forward.”
What a gift to be told exactly what happened, from her clear-eyed perspective, with no ambiguity.
It’s rare that a celebrity just comes out with it and castigates their also-famous ex for such easily defined misdeeds. Cardi B has become somewhat notorious for it, but since she and her exes share children, her venom isn’t a fully gratifying display. Who knows how long Megan has been tolerating the alleged romantic crimes of Thompson, her boyfriend of just under a year, but thank god all she did was maybe buy a house with that 6-foot-5 disappointment instead of marrying him.
We already know that if a man wants to cheat, he’ll do it. It doesn’t really matter how great his girlfriend is. But Megan Thee Stallion? Megan Thee Stallion? The woman who looks like what I think about when I ride a bike??? Pack it in, girls. We’re doomed.
Meg’s statement has led to plenty of conjecture, much of which remains unverified: that he had been cheating on her for months, that he was carrying on an affair with a WNBA player (who has since vehemently denied any involvement), that he carried a burner phone when he was dating Laura Harrier, that his 2019 “cheating diary” was exposed by a jilted ex. All we know for sure is what we see, which is Meg on Broadway performing in Moulin Rouge, crying. It’s activating her fanbase in a way they’ve been, tragically, preparing for.
Even by the standards of our standom era, Megan’s fans are uniquely protective. After rapper Tory Lanez shot her in 2020 and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, she’s been harassed and brutalized by men online and the ones in her industry. For the last six years, she’s been the target of misogynoir attacks against the veracity of her story (confirmed several times over), against her body, her skin color, her sexual history, all in the name of defending Lanez, Canada’s eighth-most-interesting rapper. (He’s somewhere behind Snow.)
DJ Akademiks, a man whose head looks permanently bee-stung, offered his unsolicited opinion over the weekend: “Ain’t no rapper finna turn my boy into a cuck,” he wrote on X. “She thought she was bigger than the program. Cut it out!” Cruel and unnecessary, it’s another reminder of just how wretched the public has been to Meg. With Thompson’s alleged infidelity, it’s one more reason for an unkind public to dog her even harder.
So why should she be coy? There are no courts for personal grievances like these, no moral authority you can appeal to. And even when you do go through those formal channels, like Meg did when she was literally shot in the foot, she’s still accused of lying. In 2023, she and her then-boyfriend Pardison Fontaine broke up, and she released “Cobra” ostensibly about finding him cheating in her bed. “Pulled up, caught him cheating, getting his dick sucked in the same spot I’m sleeping,” she rapped. In response, Fontaine called it “a loose interpretation” and said that her lyric “made people not want to interview me,” while a host of the world’s smallest violins cued up. The court of public opinion was her best avenue to holding her ex accountable. There’s no value in obfuscating the details for a celebrity and artist like Meg. Thompson’s alleged infidelity is compounded by a public record of Meg always being the last to know what these men are up to.
Now, she’s telling us first. Not through metaphor or song, not through hard-to-parse vague-posting, and not through a healing journey. Fire first, then rain.
At the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama told us to go high when they go low, and suffice it to say that the last decade has proven that she was wrong. The only thing to do when someone goes low—namely, when your partner of nearly a year allegedly cheats on you, a humiliating display from an adult man who brought you home to meet his family—is to go subterranean. Descend into the caverns of the subway system. Dig your way down to the Earth’s core. Go to hell, and drag him down with you. Use his body as a pool noodle in the Styx. The point of all this high ground was to maintain your dignity, but there’s a different, more powerful kind of dignity in knowing what happened, and stating it plainly.
Meg gave Thompson at least one small kindness in the form of waiting until the end of his lousy season to call him an asshole to her 32.9 million followers (he only has 16.6 million, embarrassing). He has all summer to quietly lick his wounds. But around the same time she went public, the Dallas Mavericks Instagram posted a photo of Thompson with his nickname “The Captain” and a caption that said he would be “coming to a theater near you.” The project, whatever it is, has yet to be announced, but already, the Mavericks have had to limit the comments. The damage is done: scroll through and you’ll get a few hundred women posting tomato emojis. “Is this gonna be a documentary about how he cheated?” asked one woman.
The same weekend Meg went public with her breakup, Beyoncé’s almost-divorce opus Lemonade turned 10. When it was released, the record was a rare example of a famous person telling us about her husband’s catastrophic failure, while also not really telling us much at all. The mere tendrils of detail were enough, especially for someone so notoriously private. But men still benefit from the female inclination to keep your dirty laundry at home. Their hope, usually, is that what they’ve done is embarrassing enough to keep you from telling anyone. The humiliation becomes yours to carry. But Thompson is a big boy. He can hold all that shame on his own.
