Young Thug’s YSL Trial Kicks Off With Quote From ‘The Jungle Book’ – And Messy Delays

Atlanta prosecutors accused chart-topping rapper Young Thug of running a criminal street gang that operated like a “pack” of wolves during opening statements of the artist’s high-profile racketeering trial on Monday (Nov. 27).

Kicking off a complex trial that is expected to last as long as a year, Fulton County Chief Deputy District Attorney Adriane Love read a passage from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book about wolf packs — and said that Thug’s gang had similarly “operated as a pack.”

“For ten years and counting, the group calling itself ‘Young Slime Life’ dominated the Cleveland Avenue community,” Love told the jury. “They created a crater … that sucked in the youth and innocence and even the lives of some its youngest members.”

Love repeatedly referred to Thug as “King Slime” and portrayed him as the clear leader of the gang: “The evidence will show that the members of YSL knew who their leader was, and they knew the repercussions of not obeying him.”

In an indictment unveiled last year, Fulton County prosecutors alleged that Thug (Jeffery Williams) and his “YSL” were not really a popular music collective called “Young Stoner Life,” but a violent Atlanta gang called “Young Slime Life” that committed murders, carjackings, drug dealing and other crimes over the course of a decade.

Along with other charges, Thug is accused of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a law based on the more famous federal RICO statute that’s been used to target the mafia, drug cartels and other forms of organized crime. If convicted on all eight of his counts, Thug faces decades in prison.

Go read an explainer of the YSL case here, including a full breakdown of the legal charges and a deep-dive into the background of the accusations.

After months of slow-moving jury selection, Monday morning was set to finally mark the start of the trial for Thug and five remaining alleged members of his gang. But the start of the hearing was delayed for an hour over a missing juror; then, just minutes into Love’s statements, the case was bogged down in objections, forcing Judge Ural Glanville to clear the jury from the courtroom.

Defense attorneys first claimed that Love was “burden shifting” in her explanation of the case to jurors – meaning she was wrongly making it appear that the defendants would need to prove that they were innocent. Thug’s lawyer, Brian Steel, then moved for a mistrial after he claimed that Love had shown jurors evidence that had already been explicitly banned from the case. Glanville later denied that request but admonished the state for how it had prepared its opening statements.

Eventually, after a lunch break and extended disputes among counsel for both sides, jurors returned to the courtroom for opening statements to continue throughout the afternoon.

This is a developing story and will be updated later today with more information from Monday’s hearing.