Rapper Da Brat Sentenced to 3 Years in Prison

Rapper Da Brat has been sentenced Friday in an Atlanta court to 3 years in prison for hitting a cocktail waitress on the head with a rum bottle following a heated exchange at a Halloween party last year.

Presiding in an Atlanta courtroom, DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Gail Flake also slapped the U.S. rap star, real name Shawntae Harris, with seven years' probation and 200 hours of community service for the incident that occurred at a suburban Atlanta nightclub last fall.

Judge Flake also required the rapper to complete substance abuse treatment, mental evaluation and anger management classes.

The incident occurred on Oct. 31 during a private Halloween party at a Jermaine Dupri-owned Studio 72 nightclub in Tucker, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta.
Mekka Parish, a spokeswoman with the DeKalb County Police Department, at the time said that a 24-year-old waitress accidentally bumped Brat as she walked through Studio 72's VIP lounge, and the two got into a squabble.

The waitress, named Shayla Stevens, who was then-Atlanta Falcons football cheerleader and was working part-time as a hostess, walked away and moments later the “Ghetto Love" rapper hit her in the face with a rum bottle, causing her to fall down some stairs to a cement floor and sustain deep cuts on her cheek after the glass shattered.

The victim, who suffered permanent facial scarring, was immediately taken by a friend to a nearby hospital, treated and released.

Harris pleaded guilty to aggravated assault charges stemming from the nightclub incident. "My client always understood she did something wrong from the beginning," said Harris' defense attorney BJ Bernstein.

"She feels a great deal of remorse for what she did," Harris's lawyer, Thomas Clegg, said. "She is willing to accept responsibility for what she has done."

Harris and her half-dozen family members all broke down when a sheriff’s deputy took her into custody. “I love you all,” Harris said to her relatives. “We love you too!,” the family member replied.

Harris, born in Chicago in 1974, started rapping at age 11, and was one of the first of a new breed of hard-edged female MCs to hit the hip-hop scene during the '90s.

With her signature playful style and tart-tongued rhymes, Da Brat had chart success in 1994 with her single and video entitled "Funkdafied," taken from her debut album of the same name.