Young Thug's lawyer Brian Steel says prosecutors target rappers by design

Brian Steel has spent 35 years defending people he believes were wrongly accused, and two of those cases made him a recognised figure in rap. The Atlanta attorney represented Young Thug through the YSL RICO trial, joined Sean Combs's defence in 2025, and in March took a place on Lil Durk's team. He spoke to XXL for its Summer 2026 issue, published on 26 August 2026, while preparing for the Durk trial.

His central argument is that hip-hop is policed differently. Lyrics, tattoos, clothing and even ordinary turns of phrase in a text message are being turned into evidence, he says, and prosecutors, judges, police officers and agents have all taken part. His word for the practice is racist. He puts it as a test: a man covered in tattoos wearing an anti-police shirt walks around unbothered, and the same look on a person of colour produces a stop.

Young Thug, born Jeffery Williams, is the case he keeps returning to. Steel describes phone calls about arrests after routine traffic stops, one passenger taken off a plane, a house searched by a large armed contingent. He says he would have quit if he had lost that trial, and that he knew the claim that his client's lyrics were instructions to kill was not true.

His account of the trial is an accusation of misconduct. He says the state produced a witness list inflated by roughly 600 names, that people he interviewed told him they had given prosecutors information helpful to his client which was never disclosed, and that the judge did nothing about it. Thug accepted a plea in 2024 with his sentence commuted to time served and 15 years of probation.

On Combs, Steel is candid about disliking the outcome even while calling the charges overcharged. The jury acquitted on sex trafficking and racketeering and convicted on transportation to engage in prostitution, and Steel says the sentence treated his client as though he had coerced people. He does not soften the rest: he says Combs violently laid hands on women, that nobody needs to punish him further for it, and that no one is trying to change minds about it.

Steel's own route into the work runs through Queens, business studies at the University of Michigan, a switch to tax law, then Fordham law school, where watching a teenager convicted of murder redirected him. He moved to Atlanta, worked as a public defender, and started The Steel Law Firm with his wife Colette in 1997.

Drake named a song after him last year, which Steel says he learned about from a reporter asking for comment. He found it funny. What he says he actually wants is duller and harder: the advice he gives clients under public scrutiny is about what they want for their own children, and it ends with education, and no drugs, guns, violence or gangs.

Our reporting on the trial ahead of him includes Lil Durk asking for two scholars to explain drill to jurors, and on his former client, Young Thug fighting a lawsuit over the Lil Wayne tour bus shooting. The rest is under hip-hop.