Los Angeles jurors deliberated for only about three hours before clearing him of two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm.
The 36-year-old hip-hop star, fashion mogul and burgeoning actor — whose legal name is Rakim Mayers — risked more than 24 years in prison if he had been convicted.
On the eve of trial, he turned down a prosecution offer of just six months in jail, along with probation and other conditions, if he would plead guilty to one count.
Insisting on his innocence, and with two young toddler sons at home along with his longtime partner Rihanna, the 36-year-old Rocky decided to gamble that a jury would feel the same.
It paid off. The jurors felt at least that there was reasonable doubt of his guilt.
Rihanna attended the trial sporadically and brought the couple's two sons — two-year-old RZA Athelston Mayers and one-year-old Riot Rose Mayers — for some of the closing arguments.
The verdict came at the height of Rocky's fame, if not the pinnacle of his music career.
The three-time Grammy nominee has a banner year in the works, and can now look to it without the threat of prison hanging over him.
He is scheduled to headline the Rolling Loud music festival in March; he is one of the celebrity co-chairs of fashion's biggest night, the Met Gala, in May; and he stars with Denzel Washington in director Spike Lee's film Highest 2 Lowest, set for release in early summer.
Prosecutors and their witnesses said that he was beefing with a former friend, A$AP Relli, with whom he had been in a crew who called themselves the A$AP Mob since high school.
They said the two men met up in Hollywood on November 6, 2021, and after a scuffle Rocky pulled the gun and fired twice at Relli, who said one of the shots grazed his knuckle but was not seriously hurt.
Rocky's lawyer Joe Tacopina said in his closing argument that Relli is "an angry pathological liar" who "committed perjury again and again and again and again".
Rocky's lawyers and witnesses they called said Rocky had shot a prop gun that only fires blanks, which he had been carrying for security since taking it from a music video set months earlier.
They said he fired it as a warning because Relli was attacking another member of their crew.
The jurors were told that despite three years passing since the incident, no one mentioned the phony gun to authorities until the day jury selection began at the trial.
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