Lil Baby on Young Thug RICO Arrest: 'I Could Have Been With Him'

Lil Baby says he was with Young Thug the day he was arrested as part of the widely criticized RICO case in 2022, telling Lil Yachty in a new interview that he left just two hours before a raid of a property connected with the Business Is Business artist.

Baby is the latest guest on Yachty’s A Safe Place podcast, with the two at one point discussing happiness more generally before zeroing in on how good it felt to see Thug be released earlier this year after a lengthy Fulton County trial.

“I’m the happiest I’ve been in a long time,” Baby told Yachty around 70 minutes into the video below. “Not content. Ain’t happy as I wanna be and I ain’t happy as I know I can get, as I know I can be.”

A “big portion” of his current happiness, Baby added, is due to Thug’s freedom.

“Definitely happy Slime home, for sure. A thousand percent,” he said. “That’s a big portion of it. It was a joyous day. Like, what people don’t know and I didn’t even tell people, I could have been with him. You know, I was at his house the same day. Thank God I just had to leave two hours early. That’ll fuck your head up more than anything.”

In the YSL RICO case, Thug ultimately took what’s called a “blind plea” after prosecutors continued to push what Thug’s legal team called “unconscionable” conditions as part of a would-be deal. Blind pleas are a rarity, as REFORM Alliance’s chief policy officer, Erin Haney, recently relayed to Shawn Setaro for this Complex piece.

Gunna, who had also been charged in the case, previously took what’s called an Alford plea, the details of which have been frequently placed at the center of rampant misinformation. He was released from custody in late 2022.

In the Yachty chat, Baby also cited Thug’s meticulous creative process as one that he looks to as a prime example of how far he still has to go as a rapper himself. Baby sees himself as someone who is currently operating at about “40 percent of his craft” after roughly eight years in the game.

“I had to mold myself to become a rapper,” Baby said of his come-up, noting that he still doesn’t know “what a hi-hat is” or “what reverb is.” Put another way, he added, the “terminology” of making music and the ability to “verbally execute” while in the studio is something he’s still learning.

“[Thug] could goddamn make a song go backwards. … I feel like I gotta be able to know how to do that,” he said.

Earlier this month, Baby rang in his 30th birthday with a special hometown show in Atlanta. 42 Dugg, 4batz, and more surprised attendees at the State Farm Arena, while Sexyy Red also put her scene-stealing presence to use to perform a pair of recent hits. Get the full rundown here.