Why Machine Gun Kelly’s dad went on trial for his own father’s murder
Machine Gun Kelly had a tough childhood. After his mother left the family while MGK was just nine, his father fell into a depression—and, as the future rapper and singer later reflected, his father’s bleak state of mind brought up some bad stuff from his past.
MGK spoke about this on Bunnie XO’s Dumb Blonde podcast in August 2024, explaining that his dad had once faced trial for murdering his own father—while he was just nine years of age. His dad, as a young child, literally endured this most traumatic of experiences.
“The story that was always told to me was that their dad dropped the gun, and his head essentially blew off,” MGK reflected. “All happened in the room with my dad at nine years old. So him and my grandmother were tried for the murder. They were both acquitted.”
His dad was obviously deeply affected by this awful event, and he carried the mental scars of it into his adulthood. MGK, indeed, saw his dad’s trauma play out in real time during his own childhood. Given what his dad had seen when he was a kid, he wasn’t able to handle loud noises in later life—which upset MGK, who was too young to understand what was going on with his father.
“I would be like, ‘You’re supposed to be a man, dude. Why are you acting like this?’ and it just made me hate him,” MGK admitted. “And then, you sit there, and you think about a kid who was on trial at nine years old for the murder of his father… I had a very interesting talk with him on his deathbed about that moment.”
MGK’s dad died in 2020, with MGK posting on social media at the time that he had “never felt a pain this deep in my life.” Clearly, as he had gotten older, he had learned to understand why his father had acted in strange ways while he was growing up, and he sympathised with him.
As he said in that Dumb Blonde interview, “In my situation with my father, he was so tormented from some of the most insane shit that I can imagine a kid can go through that he had to figure it out, but with almost every possible bad circumstance going against him, too.”
MGK also reflected on his younger self’s feelings towards his dad, admitting that, as a child, he had probably expected too much of him. “It’s almost like the expectations are too high,” he noted. “Because we think that they know everything because we grew up looking up at them. But we’re all just lost and trying to figure it out.”
In the 2022 documentary about his life, Machine Gun Kelly’s Life in Pink, MGK reflected on how his dad’s trauma passed on to him. “’Cause he never took a chance to heal, all that stuff, it came out on me as I grew up,” he said. His own daughter, Casie, then picked up from her father. “I can see why my dad was so depressed,” she said, “’cause like, it kind of passed on through generations to him.”