Chapter 1: What incident led to D4vd being named a target in a Grand Jury investigation?
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Hello and welcome back to Fame Under Fire from BBC Sounds with me, Anushka Matanda-Dowatine. I just want to say that this episode might not be for everybody. We are going to be discussing the apparent murder. I'm saying apparent because we don't have all the details of Celeste Rivas Hernandez, who was a child when she died. The details are graphic and some listeners might find them upsetting.
So you can head to halfway through the episode for our analysis, or we have an Epstein fact or fiction on a question about Michael Jackson, Madeleine McCann and Epstein that we're doing later in the pod. But we're going to start with this unfolding case in LA.
Some of you would have heard of it, some of you will have no idea what I'm talking about, so I'm going to walk it all the way back to the beginning. On the 24th of May 2024, a 13-year-old girl is reported missing by her family who live in Lake Elsinore, that's a city in California. The last known sighting of her, according to a missing person flyer cited by CBS News, was in April 2024.
Her name is Celeste Rivas Hernandez. Now, it's not the first time she'd gone missing. The LA Times reported that the Riverside County Sheriff's Office said that she was reported missing three times before she went missing again in April. Over a year later, on the 27th of August 2025, a Tesla parked in the Hollywood Hills caught the eye of a parking enforcement officer.
It had overstayed the three-day parking limit there. The officer gave it a ticket on the 3rd of September and it was then towed to a local lot two days later. I'm going to read directly from the court documents now but I want to reiterate the warning because it contains graphic detail that some of you might find upsetting. So it says,
The manager told police there was a strong smell of decay coming from the vehicle, which was attracting flies. LAPD detectives responded to the Hollywood tow yard to investigate.
Detectives approached the vehicle, which was parked on the upper deck of the impound lot, and immediately noticed a smell of decaying biological material consistent with the decomposing corpse coming from the front storage compartment of the vehicle.
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Chapter 2: What details surround the case of Celeste Rivas Hernandez?
We also reached out to the LAPD for a comment and we haven't heard back from them either. The world wants to know what happened to that little girl and why does it feel like the case has stalled? Then last week, we got our first real update. Joining me now to go through it all is our resident trial attorney, Sean Kent. Hi, Sean. Hey Anushka, how are you doing? I'm good.
I mean, I know we've spoken about this before, but of course this is a difficult topic and it's very graphic and I want to keep reminding the listeners that you can go halfway through and listen to our Epstein Fact or Fiction if this isn't for you. But I've just done an explainer of the case, walked through what's happened.
Sean, as I mentioned, the cause of death in this case has been sealed and we've had little detail about what's actually going on. But then David's dad, D for V.I.D., the singer, He filed some papers in Texas that were arguing against a court summons. And from this, we got to see some more detail.
Number one, we can see that a grand jury has been convened and that they have summoned his family to testify. Sean, can you just remind everybody what a grand jury is?
So what didn't have happened is family got a subpoena. A subpoena basically says you must come forth. You must show up. You must either bring your documents or you must bring yourself to testify. A grand jury is an investigative body, if you will, from the area where the crime is supposedly occurred. And so what the grand jury does is they vote. They look at all the information.
They look at all evidence. They listen to potential witnesses. And they make a decision whether or not you should be charged and indicted with a crime. So you... technically have been charged, but the grand jury makes the decision whether or not that crime should go forth a little bit further.
And so once these people have gotten a subpoena, our grand jury has said, or the California grand jury has said, y'all need to show up and testify, ask questions, so we can try to figure out if the case against David should go further.
If David is who we're looking at, and now that we know from looking at some of the documentation, he's what's called a target, which means he knows he is being looked at, and the grand jury is trying to make a decision if he should be indicted.
Right, exactly. So in the papers, we can see from what his dad's filed that David is being referred to as, quote, the target. Now, is that normal phraseology? And should we glean from that that charges are coming or does that happen and then it doesn't amount to anything anyway?
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Chapter 3: What evidence is there linking D4vd to Celeste Rivas Hernandez?
If you go back to the Diddy trial, everyone remembers that he was charged with a plethora of charges, a bunch of them. And at the time, a lot of people were like, why is he charged with such a small charge? But if you remember, he was found not guilty of a lot of charges and then found guilty of the prostitution charge that led him in jail.
So to go back to your question, it could be the same scenario. charge him with everything. And if for some reason, some of these other charges flips, at least we have a conviction on our better charge. Realistically though, it will be difficult, if not impossible, given the fact that the young girl has passed, given what we have heard. And of course, I don't know much of the evidence.
It's going to be very difficult to prove that he was engaged make sure I say this, engaged in a sexual relationship with an underage minor, because that would be the proof. He can be friends with an underage minor, and that would be his defense and things of that nature. But to prove that he is engaged in a sexual relationship with an underage minor would be difficult.
Third, to take all that, a good prosecutor possibly, make this possibly, because again, David is still innocent until proven guilty. We haven't heard any facts. I haven't looked at any of the evidence, anything. A good prosecutor possibly could utilize that as motive. Possibly David's underage relationship with this child. She is that, a child. could be the reason why the child lost their life.
And they could point to David. And that's what prosecutors do a lot of times, that they might be looking for a motive. And that's a lot of times the hardest thing to prove on these cases. And that might be why they're having all this family member go for the grand jury. We need to figure out what the motivation is for why this possibly happened. And that's sometimes why you meet with grand juries.
All of that goes to answer your question on would the relationship with the underage child be important to a prosecutor? And it could be important for a bevy of reasons.
And another thing that's been raised over and over, especially since his name was released, obviously, as the target, and we now know that he is being investigated by the grand jury, is the content of his art, his song lyrics, his videos. We've spoken about this before, Sean. This is a tricky topic here. I want to read you some. This is from Romantic Homicide, which was released in 2022.
Some of the lyrics, in the back of my mind, you died and I didn't even cry later on. In the back of my mind, I killed you and I didn't even regret it. I can't believe I said it, but it's true. I hate you. In one of his videos for the song One More Dance, he can be seen dragging a body while covered in blood that he then puts in the boot of a car, in the trunk of a car.
Sorry, boot's probably quite English. In the trunk of a car. We see in the video that the body he's dragging is actually him. That was released in February 2025. Once again, we're in a hypothetical situation because no one's been charged, but we know he's referred to as the target. If they do raise charges against him, this makes its way to court.
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Chapter 4: How does the Grand Jury process work in this investigation?
And not to be the correct professor, but if it is ruled a homicide and then the prosecutor chooses to charge with murder, there are certain things that are called special circumstances, right? And looking in there, yes, it could increase depending on the special circumstances in California, depending on what they find. Could they make this a death penalty case? Yes.
Could they increase the penalties? Yes. But it all goes to what they can prove about that dismemberment. Was it done? Why was it done? And you may not be familiar, but there literally is a famous case in California that happened. There was a television show about it called The Jinx with a guy by the name of Robert Durst. It had a Texas and California tie in.
What ended up happening in that similar situation is he dismembered a body. They were not able to prove that he killed the person, but he was able to prove that he dismembered the body. And he got charged with the dismemberment and not the murder and didn't do a lot of time on that. Now, people watch. You can find out later that a lot of more information came out as a result of that.
But yes, dismembering a body and disposing of it incorrectly, if you will, is a separate charge that someone can find themselves on.
Okay, but so we know from the legal docs that the body was placed in cadaver bags, which indicates or could possibly indicate a level of planning as they had to be purchased. You can actually get them on Amazon, which I found crazy. How does that affect the way this is prosecuted?
If there's a level of thought and planning that's gone into it rather than, would you call it rather than like a crime of passion?
Perfect analysis. You're exactly right. Depending on where they're going to go, a good prosecutor will use that. They will say that the murder is the intentional killing, the premeditated intentional killing of another with malice of forethought. That means you had to say exactly, is it the level of planning and preparation that went forth?
let's say for argument's sake, the person who finds themselves accused of this charge gets on the stand and says, this was an awful accident. I didn't mean this happened because that's what happened in the Robert Durst case. This was an awful accident and I panicked and then I severed and took care of the body and took it over.
Well, let's say they make that same argument and then they catch him in Walmart six months earlier because they will find it if it exists, finding these bags. So why would you have been buying the bag six months before the shooting if you were the killing or whatever if you were not planning on killing this person all along? All this goes to the premeditated nature of what proves a murder.
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