A civil trial involving allegations Cardi B assaulted a female security guard inside a Beverly Hills medical building seven years ago started Monday, with jurors hearing dramatically different accounts of what allegedly happened.
Taking the stand as the first witness, plaintiff Emani Ellis claimed she was conducting her routine rounds on Feb. 24, 2018, when she saw the Grammy-winning artist exit an elevator outside a fifth-floor obstetrician’s office. Ellis said she exclaimed something like, “Wow, that’s Cardi B,” and that the rapper, born Belcalis Almánzar, turned and accused her of using her phone to spread news of her private medical visit. (Almánzar was four months pregnant with her first child with Migos rapper Offset at the time. The pregnancy was still a secret.)
“She was extremely upset,” Ellis testified. “She put her finger in my face.” The guard claimed under oath that she wasn’t using her phone, and that she tried to tell Almánzar that. Ellis claimed Almánzar yelled at her, cut her left cheek with a three-inch fingernail, and spit on her. “I was deeply traumatized about what happened,” Ellis testified.
When it was his turn to cross-examine Ellis, Almánzar’s lawyer, Peter Anderson, confronted Ellis with an incident report she submitted to her supervisor two days after her alleged assault. He said it contradicted her testimony that she wasn’t using a phone during the confrontation. In the report, Ellis admitted she was pressing her personal cell phone to her ear around the time the encounter started. In the report, Ellis told her supervisor she had been checking her voicemail because her mother was ill.
Anderson also grilled Ellis over another alleged inconsistency between her direct testimony and the Feb. 28, 2018, report to her boss. “You said in the incident report that she scratched you on your nose, [but] you testified in this trial that Cardi B cut your cheek,” Anderson said. “You changed your story.” (The incident report did not appear to mention an injury to Ellis’ cheek, according to the line of questioning, but Ellis testified that she received plastic surgery to treat a cut on her cheek.)
“She touched my nose, but she scratched my cheek,” Ellis replied, not backing down.
In his opening statement, Anderson said Almánzar was visiting Los Angeles for work that weekend when she became concerned about her pregnancy and “took special steps” to set up a highly confidential appointment with an OB-GYN. It was a Saturday, and the office was closing early to accommodate her without any other patients present, he said. When Almánzar stepped off the elevator and heard Ellis call out her name with a phone to her ear, she was justifiably concerned, he said.
“Cardi turned around and saw the plaintiff holding up the phone, filming or photographing her,” Anderson told the jury. He said Almánzar tried asking Ellis why she thought it was okay to photograph her in such a private setting, and Ellis allegedly gave the “belligerent” response, “Because I can.”
Anderson said it was true that a verbal argument ensued — one that was so loud, people from the nearby office came out to calm the situation. He said Ellis was the one who posed a physical threat.
“Cardi B was facing someone who, with all respect, testified she was 240-250 pounds. [She was] wearing black military boots, hovering over her, yelling and screaming at her, taking swings at her, trying to get to her,” he said. “[Almánzar] feared for her unborn baby. This is her first. And a very large woman was advancing toward her. She was utterly confused that a security guard could be her attacker.”
Almánzar, 32, is due to testify in the case on Tuesday. As she left the courthouse in Alhambra, California, on Monday, the now mother of three pulled out her phone to FaceTime with her 11-month-old daughter, Blossom.
Ellis first sued Cardi in February 2020. In her 13-page complaint, she claimed Almánzar physically attacked her and then “used her celebrity status to get [her] fired.” As the trial started Monday, Ellis and her lawyer said they were dropping the employment claim related to the alleged plot to get her fired. Almánzar had denied the allegation.
In an April 2018 medical history report previously filed in the case, a psychologist wrote that the security guard said Almánzar “put her finger in [Ellis’] face,” in a manner “almost touching [Ellis’] nose.” The psychologist described the confrontation as a “screaming match.”
Almánzar and her lawyers claim that’s what happened. They admit Almánzar used some strong language, but they’re adamant she never touched Ellis. In his opening, Anderson described his client as a loving mother of three who grew up in poverty but worked very hard to become a “critically acclaimed,” self-made superstar. (Almánzar is set to release her second studio album, Am I the Drama?, on Sept. 19.)
In addition to Anderson, Almánzar’s defense team includes prominent trial lawyer Lisa F. Moore, the attorney who helped the rapper score a $4 million jury verdict against gossip blogger Latasha Kebe, professionally known as Tasha K. Moore also helped Almánzar win at a California-based federal trial where she was accused of using a portion of a man’s back tattoo on the cover of her early mixtape Gangsta Bitch Music Vol. 1.
In September 2022, Almánzar accepted a no-jail plea deal and pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges linked to a bottle-tossing brawl inside a Queens strip club in 2018. “Part of growing up and maturing is being accountable for your actions. As a mother, it’s a practice that I am trying to instill in my children, but the example starts with me,” she said in a statement at the time. “These moments don’t define me, and they are not reflective of who I am now.”
