South Park Monster

In pleading for probation, Coy came up with more grandiose boasts. "Y'all all credit [Mayor] Lee Brown with calming down the gang problem," he said. "I think y'all should thank South Park Mexican."

After sharp questioning about crack dealing and other crimes, he was confronted with the obvious: How could eight young females be wrong in their belief that he molested them or worse?

Michael Hogue

Deron Neblett

Coy rebounded from poverty to pursue national attention as a rapper.

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• Sylvia Coy
• Carlos Coy
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• Hip-Hop and Rap
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

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The seventh-grader from Pasadena? Coy said she was holding a wine cooler when he met her and looked like a "party type." He alluded to another girl as if she was a slut who probably had been in cheap motels before. One young victim and her mother? "The Lady and the Tramp," Coy called them.

No, these weren't the vulnerable girls who Coy had stripped of their innocence. They were liars, all liars. And worse.

The rapper had slipped back into his beat, calling forth sarcastic and occasionally savage scorn for his accusers. Some of his supporters stifled their own glee but snickered at this icon of defiance. But the rap wasn't playing well in this venue, not with the audience that counted most.

After seven hours of deliberation, jurors issued the ultimate critique of his performance. Their verdict: 45 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Coy wasn't quite finished with his courtroom duties yet. Judge Ellis, the man with the wooden hammer, summoned him to the bench. In 17 years of criminal justice work, the judge said, Coy was no exception to what he'd learned about sex offenders: that they all were liars.

"You've lied to this court, you've lied to your family, you've lied to your fans with your so-called positive raps when your own life wasn't right," Ellis told him. "The fact is that there is only one victim in this case, and it is a nine-year-old girl," Ellis said. "Now that is reality, and you need to deal with it.

"It's time for you to face the music," Ellis concluded.

The victim's father, Coy's former longtime friend, also ended his victim impact statement with another slap at the rapper. "Coy, you're just gonna be another six-digit number in prison, and you're gonna be singing another tune: 'Don't Mess with Texas.' "

Coy is expected to appeal the verdict. His supporters say his female accusers are just trying to cash in on his wealth and predict they will file civil damage lawsuits. In the meantime, he plans to add to the 300 pages of memoirs he's written while in jail. "The guy's constantly going. He's either always writing songs or writing a book, which I think was good therapy for him, something to keep him busy," his sister says.

Prison may be especially harsh for the rapper, because inmates are known to retaliate against child molesters. Hispanic convicts tend to protect themselves more than other ethnic groups, "but even among the Hispanics, there's very low tolerance for sex offenders, especially when they've got child victims," says TDCJ's Johnson.

She believes he's likely to be put in protective custody and slowly eased into the main prison population. "As long as he just keeps his mouth shut," Johnson says, "there probably won't be anybody that will really pay attention to him."

And that silence may be the ultimate punishment for the man who gained attention with his mouth in a wild ride to fame.