MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Rick Ross surrendered to police here Thursday on a felony charge of battery by strangulation and a misdemeanor battery count after an ex-girlfriend told detectives he choked her “to the point where she could not breathe” during an argument in August, The Washington Post and AL.com reported.
The battery is alleged to have occurred at Ross’ residence on Star Island, where his long-time close associate Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs also lives. The duo posted a provocative video in 2023, alongside Janice Combs and Caresha Brownlee (Yung Miami), showcasing “Slippery Soap.”
“We don’t have no shame in our game,” Diddy proclaimed in the video. “We want it all!”
The Battery
The woman went to police Tuesday. According to the arrest affidavit, Ross, 50, whose legal name is William Leonard Roberts II, woke her on Aug. 28 “in a jealous rage” over a photo on social media, accused her of seeing someone else, and struck her each time she denied it. She said he hit her in the chest, grabbed her by the ponytail, slammed her against a wall and choked her. She gave investigators photographs of her injuries.
Rick Ross was booked at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center at 6:10 a.m. At his bond hearing, defense attorney Bradley Horenstein asked Miami-Dade County Judge Mindy Glazer whether his client’s release could be “expedited” given his public profile.
“I have no idea who you are,” Glazer told Ross, “except as somebody here in the court who’s going to be treated fairly just like everybody else here.” She set bond at $6,000 and ordered him to stay away from the woman. He posted it and left the same day. Through Horenstein and Atlanta lawyer Steve Sadow, he pleaded not guilty. “Mr. Roberts is innocent,” they said. Arraignment is Oct. 22.
From the driver’s seat of his car that evening, Ross told his followers the charges were “baseless,” said he looked “forward to winning his case,” and said he would soon be in Dubai and Paris “eating a big bowl of rigatoni with heavy marinara sauce.”
It is currently unclear if the remarks about eating rigatoni were code for something else. In another video posted yesterday, Ross cryptically stated he was “bigger than Justin Beiber.” Many critics have remarked that Beiber appeared to be a victim of Combs.
Rick Ross’ Criminal Record: Kidnapping, Aggravated Assault, and more.
This is not Ross’ first felony. In June 2015, Fayette County, Georgia, deputies arrested Ross and his bodyguard on kidnapping and aggravated assault charges after a groundskeeper at his estate said Ross pistol-whipped him. Ross pleaded no contest to aggravated assault in April 2017 and took time served, five years’ probation and a $10,000 fine. In January 2013, someone shot at his car on his birthday in Fort Lauderdale. In 2024, a crowd beat him in a Vancouver parking lot after he played a Drake diss track at his own show.
Ross took his name from “Freeway” Ricky Ross, the Los Angeles cocaine trafficker, and spent his first decade on record as a kingpin: “Hustlin’,” “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast),” “I Think She Like Me,” verses about moving bricks and buying judges.
In 2008, The Smoking Gun published his personnel file. From December 1995 to June 1997 he was a corrections officer at the South Florida Reception Center. He denied it until the paperwork made denial impossible. When the real Ricky Ross sued over the name, a California court ruled in December 2013 that the rapper’s use of it was protected speech, because the character was fiction.
Can The Lyrics Come In As Evidence?
Not to prove he is the kind of man who would do this. Florida’s evidence code, at section 90.404, bars evidence offered solely to show bad character or propensity, and any lyric a prosecutor offers has to survive a second test: that its value as proof is not substantially outweighed by the prejudice it causes. That rule is why Ross can rap about choking rivals and never hear it read to a jury in a domestic violence case. Lyrics get in when they describe the crime charged.
Broward County prosecutors assembled “song after song” against YNW Melly after his 2023 murder mistrial because the songs described shootings like the ones he was accused of. A Fulton County judge let 17 sets of Young Thug’s lyrics into the YSL racketeering trial on the condition that the state tie each one to the conspiracy. California banned the practice outright in 2022, and the federal RAP Act, reintroduced in July 2025, would do the same in federal court. Florida has no such statute. So the question for the state attorney is narrow. If Ross has recorded a verse about an August night, a ponytail and a wall, it is evidence. If he has only recorded a thousand verses about being dangerous, it is a career.
The Company Rick Ross Keeps
Ross’s closest public association in the business is Sean Combs. The two have recorded together, toured together, and, in a clip that still circulates, washed cars together. When Combs’ defense wanted to show a jury that a witness enjoyed her time around him, it played a Rick Ross video with her in the background.
Days before the trial, Combs hired Xavier Donaldson, the lawyer who had kept Ross out of prison in Georgia. Combs is now in the special housing unit at Fort Dix, where we reported he had guards carrying in cognac and a contraband phone, and where his own civil lawyers say he has stopped paying them.
The third man in the circle is Ray J. Ross walked Combs and Ray J through his Georgia mansion on camera, the same estate where the groundskeeper alleged he was pistol-whipped by Ross.
Ray J has spent the last year as Combs’ loudest defender outside the courtroom. He told Piers Morgan “there’s nothing here” and “Free Diddy.” He said he attended “a lot of parties with Diddy and there was never a freak-off,” then explained on a livestream that he was never invited to one because “I’m ugly.” He later apologized for remarks about the case and said he took “full accountability.”
Ray J is currently embattled against Kris Jenner and Kim Kardashian, facing controversial attorney, Alex Spiro.
Separately, Ray J has been repeatedly accused of being involved in the murder of Whitney Houston. A prominent private investigator revealed that his investigation revealed that Houston’s death was indeed a murder. Ray J has denied any role and has stated that he was in San Diego at the time.
Three men, one circle: a convicted sex offender serving 50 months, a rapper who built a fortune portraying a drug lord and now faces a strangulation charge, and a singer whose contribution to the record is that he was not attractive enough to see what happened behind the door. We have written about the lawyers who move between these cases, including the proxy suits that follow anyone who sues Combs’ friends.
Battery By Strangulation
Battery by strangulation is a third-degree felony in Florida, punishable by up to five years. Prosecutors created the charge in 2007 because choking is the single strongest predictor that a domestic abuser will later kill his partner. The state does not need the woman to press charges. It needs her statement, her photographs and whatever else the police gathered in the two days between her report and his surrender. Ross has a record, a probation history, and a judge who has already told him on the record that she does not care who he is.
He will be in Dubai and Paris, he says. The stay-away order says nothing about that. The arraignment is Oct. 22.
Sources: The Washington Post (Oct. 1, 2026); AL.com and OregonLive (Oct. 2, 2026); Consequence (Oct. 1, 2026); TMZ, Vice and Mediaite on the bond hearing; HotNewHipHop (Oct. 1, 2026); Fla. Stat. 784.041 and 90.404; State v. Peterson, Fayette County, Ga. (2017 plea); Ross v. Roberts (Cal. Ct. App. 2013); Fulton County Superior Court, State v. Williams (YSL) lyrics ruling (Nov. 2023); California AB 2799; H.R. 4678 (2025); Complex and Yahoo on Ray J; AllHipHop on Xavier Donaldson; Paul Smith’s reporting at Shockya. This is an opinion article.
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