It’s already been a busy week for Drake. Just a day after the Toronto rapper withdrew one of his legal actions against Universal Music Group (UMG), he filed a defamation suit in New York federal court against the music company.
The 6-God filed the defamation and harassment lawsuit on Wednesday, accusing UMG of approving and launching a campaign to create a hit that was meant to ruin the reputation of Drake by making a “false factual allegation” that the Toronto rapper is a “certified pedophile,” according to the New York Times.
This is obviously in reference to Kendrick Lamar’s scathing diss track “Not Like Us,” which became one of the most successful diss tracks in hip-hop history and arguably the biggest song of 2024. The lawsuit adds that UMG valued “corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists.”
More from the New York Times:
Noting that the cover art for “Not Like Us” features a photo of Drake’s Toronto home dotted with markers meant to represent the presence of registered sex offenders, the complaint invokes a shooting at the residence days after the song’s release that injured a security guard — calling it “the 2024 equivalent of ‘Pizzagate’” — and cites two other attempted trespassers in the days that followed.
Drake and his attorneys say that UMG did all they could to promote it because they knew it would hurt his brand and devalue his music, which would, in turn, give them leverage in future contract negotiations.
According to TMZ, the suit also alleges that the music company paid a third party to use bots to increase the streams of the popular diss track by 30 million and also engaged in a payola scheme with a radio promoter.
The news of this lawsuit comes less than a day after Drake’s Frozen Moments company dropped its legal petition against UMG and Spotify, which accused the companies of conspiring to inflate the streams of “Not Like Us.”