In a new interview, Lil Wayne-associated rapper Lil Twist claims Justin Bieber’s management asked him to take drug charges to protect the young singer’s image. Video calling into Mina SayWhat’s podcast Mina’s House, Twist told the Philadelphia radio personality he was Bieber’s scapegoat for legal issues in the early 2010s. While the two young performers were friends, Bieber did have a proclivity for getting into trouble in his early 20s, which resulted in an arrest for DUI in 2014. Lil Twist had his own similar issue in 2013 when he was arrested for DUI while speeding in Bieber’s car in Calabasas.
In the new interview, Twist says that Bieber’s handlers kept him around in case the young star ran afoul of the law (which he did on several occasions before his arrest). “If they would have put weed charges on Justin in his early career, it would have been bad on him,” So I got a call one day saying, ‘Twist, do you really love this kid?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘Cool, if you love him then you can take the heat for him because you can come off a little weed charge. You’re associated with Lil Wayne. You’re a rapper.’”
Twist doesn’t specify which charge this story refers to. Bieber’s first arrest was almost a year after Twist’s, although it’s possible he’s referring to a situation that wasn’t widely reported. But it seems likely that Twist could referring to the general arrangement of keeping him on-hand as a potential fall guy should the need arise. In any case, he says that eventually, Twist was being blamed for incidents with nothing to do with him.
“It got to a point where I didn’t even have to be there at times and they were putting it, ‘Twist did it, Twist did it, Twist did it.,’” he laments. “It became overwhelming.” It’s an accusation those close to the situation have made before. In 2014, Lil Wayne said that Justin’s manager was the one feeding stories to the press.
Watch the video of the interview above.