Cardi B is facing a wave of backlash in the United States after the rapper publicly condemned the murder conviction of Texas teenager Karmelo Anthony on X this week, calling the 35–year prison sentence handed down in Collin County ‘disgusting’ and ‘not justice’.
For context, Anthony, now 19, was found guilty of first-degree murder for stabbing 17-year-old rival athlete Austin Metcalf in the chest at a high school track meet in April 2025. The killing, which was captured on video and dissected in court through hours of witness testimony, had already turned into a fraught culture-war flashpoint long before Cardi B decided to weigh in.
Her intervention, though, supercharged it.
Cardi B Backlash Over Karmelo Anthony Comments
The news came after Cardi B posted a furious message to her 30–plus million followers on X as the details of Karmelo Anthony’s conviction and 35–year sentence rippled across social media.
‘Wow! Just freakin wow! DISGUSTING… This is not justice, this is trying to make an example!!’ she wrote, implying that Anthony, who is Black, had been treated more harshly because of his race.
Within hours, the post had racked up 10 million views and tens of thousands of replies, quotes and likes. The mood in the replies was anything but unified, but a clear pattern emerged. Supporters praised her for speaking out against what they saw as a racist justice system. Critics accused her of ignoring the evidence that persuaded a Texas jury to convict.
There was nothing subtle about some of the responses. Conservative commentator Tomi Lahren, a regular on Fox News, fired back publicly: ‘Yes, the example is, don’t stab somebody in the chest. Thanks for playing.’
That line did the rounds fast, clipped and reposted by right-leaning accounts who seized on Cardi B’s comments as proof, in their view, that celebrity activism had drifted into something reckless. It was the sort of brutal exchange social media thrives on, and which almost guarantees that nuance goes straight out the window.
How The Karmelo Anthony Case Became A Culture War
In case you missed it, the killing itself happened at what should have been a routine high school track meet in Texas. Anthony and Metcalf were from rival schools. What started as an argument over Anthony lingering near the rival team’s tent escalated into a confrontation that turned fatal.
In court, Anthony’s defence team painted a picture of a teenager who had been pushed around and humiliated. They claimed Metcalf, who was white, had bullied and intimidated Anthony, and they framed the stabbing as an act of self-defence by a young man who finally snapped.
Supporters rallied hard around that story. A crowdfunding page on GiveSendGo, now deleted, raised more than 600,000 dollars for Anthony’s defence, fuelled by claims that he was the real victim and that the case showed how Black teens are criminalised when white teens are not.
But when the jury watched the video and heard from eyewitnesses, a very different version of events emerged. Witnesses told the court that Metcalf and others had repeatedly, about 15 times according to testimony, asked Anthony to move away from their team area. Video appeared to show Metcalf giving Anthony a shove, but not a sustained attack.
Several witnesses testified that Anthony warned Metcalf, reportedly saying ‘Touch me and find out’, then reached into his backpack, pulled out a folding knife and plunged it once into Metcalf’s chest. Metcalf later died of the wound.
Jurors took only around three hours to return a guilty verdict for first-degree murder, hardly the mark of a panel agonising over a close call.
Protests, Politics And A Divided Street Outside Court
The verdict did not calm anything down. Outside the Collin County courthouse, protests flared almost immediately, with demonstrators holding signs blasting the sentence and chanting that Anthony had acted in self-defence.
‘Thirty-five years for self-defence! If [Anthony] was white, we wouldn’t even be here today,’ one woman shouted into a megaphone, in footage filmed on the courthouse steps. ‘It never would’ve had a court, there never would’ve been no handcuffs, we wouldn’t be here today!’
That is the backdrop against which Cardi B decided to enter the conversation. Her post slotted straight into an existing narrative, one where Anthony’s supporters see him as another young Black man railroaded by a system that already decided who he was before the evidence came in.
The problem, for her critics at least, is that the publicly available evidence is not thin. Video of the encounter exists. Witnesses from both sides testified. The jury’s rapid decision spoke volumes. This is where the backlash really sharpened, with many arguing that a superstar with a vast platform carries a different responsibility than a random account firing off takes.
IBTimes UK cannot independently verify all of the claims made online about the incident, so readers should take some of the more dramatic social media interpretations lightly.
A US Congresswoman Steps In, And Steps On A Landmine
For starters, Cardi B is not the only public figure to get burned by this case. Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, a rising profile in progressive politics, also waded in, and received her own torrent of criticism.
On an episode of her podcast, Crockett talked about Anthony’s case and suggested that, in a similar situation, she might also resort to a weapon. ‘If a 300-pound man is beating me, like on top of me and beating me down, I’m not limited to fists,’ she said, appearing to liken Metcalf to a much larger, more physically imposing attacker.
The problem, as court records and video evidence show, is that this did not match what actually happened. Both footage and witness accounts presented at trial indicated Metcalf was not on top of Anthony, nor was he ‘beating him down’. The prosecution argued that what occurred was a single shove, followed by a deadly escalation from Anthony.
The Collin County authorities have not suggested any racial bias in the decision to prosecute. Jurors, whose identities are shielded from the public, have not spoken. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice now lists Anthony as serving a 35–year sentence following his conviction.
So where does that leave Cardi B? At the time of writing, she has not walked back her comments or offered further clarification. The post remains live, still pulling in views and replies. For some fans, she has articulated a deep mistrust of the American justice system that statistics and studies only partly capture. For others, she has crossed a line by publicly undermining a verdict rooted in evidence she may not have fully examined.
On X, the argument is still raging. Offline, one teenager is dead, another will likely spend most of his adult life in prison, and a case that unfolded on a high school track has become yet another test of how quickly public figures can turn complex, painful stuff into a viral, polarising soundbite.
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