Drake and ‘Chair Girl’ Marcello Zoia
Canadian rapper Drake has removed a split-second cameo of a 19-year-old woman who threw a chair off a downtown Toronto high-rise balcony in February.
Drake courted controversy briefly by featuring the woman whose main claim to fame was throwing the chair off a Toronto high-rise balcony to a busy road.
The woman who made a one-second cameo in Drake’s latest video threw the chair from the 45thfloor onto highway traffic while her friends filmed her endangering lives.
The woman, Marcella Zoia, known as ‘Chair Girl’, gained a lot of attention and she pleaded guilty to causing danger to life last month.
On November 15, her lawyer told reporters Zoia was “remorseful” for her actions. A sentencing hearing in Zoia’s case is expected to take place on January 14, 2020. The Crown is asking for up to six months in jail, but her lawyer is pushing for a suspended sentence, which would include Zoia being put on probation with undetermined conditions for an unknown period of time.
The video titled War which features lot of drinking, smoking and bonfires was shot in the Blue Mountains, a ski resort north of Toronto.
In response to the barrage of online criticism Drake said in an Instagram post “I don’t choose extras for my videos by the way,” followed by the emojis of a chair and a shocked face.
FOLLOW UP: Marcella Zoia was fined $2,000 on Tuesday (June 22, 2020), with the judge saying it was lucky no one was hurt and that Zoia had been shamed publicly. The Ontario court judge rejected prosecution calls to jail Zoia, who was 19 at the time of the incident in February 2019. “I cannot find that she intended to hurt anyone when she threw that chair,” the judge said. In addition to the fine, which he called significant, Zoia will have to put in 150 hours of community service and be on probation for two years.
Zoia used a picture of what looked like her one second appearance in her Instagram account last week. After the news of the video she took to the Instagram suggesting that reaction was overblown.
“People starving out here and y’all concerned about me being in the background of a video for less than a second…”, she said.
Zoia raised eyebrows when she appeared courtside at a Toronto Raptors game – Drake is the Toronto basketball team’s global ambassador – just days after her last court date on Nov. 15.
The video, which notched up two million views in less than 24 hours, is three-minute long and the ‘chair girl’ appeared at 2.37 mark before the singer decided to edit her out.
Aubrey Drake Graham (born October 24, 1986) is a Canadian rapper, singer, songwriter, producer, actor, and businessman. He initially gained recognition as an actor on the teen television series Degrassi: The Next Generation in in the 2000s.
Among the world’s best-selling music artists with over 170 million records sold, he is ranked as the world’s highest-certified digital singles artist by Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA
Drake’s father, Dennis Graham, is an African American and a practising Catholic from Memphis, Tennessee, and worked as a drummer, performing alongside country musician Jerry Lee Lewis. His mother, Sandra “Sandi” Graham (née Sher), is an Ashkenazi Jewish Canadian who worked as an English teacher and florist. Drake was raised in Toronto after his parents divorced when he was five years old. – newstrails.com
