Drake, who is currently on tour in Australia, sued Universal Music Group last month for defamation and harassment for releasing and promoting Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.”
The suit, brought in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses Universal of having worked to make the Lamar track a “viral hit.” It said the song was “intended to convey the specific, unmistakable and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal pedophile, and to suggest that the public should resort to vigilante justice in response.” Lamar was not named as a defendant in the suit.
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. It calls the attack “the 2024 equivalent of ‘Pizzagate’” and cites two other attempted trespassers in the days that followed.
The suit was brought on behalf of Drake by Michael J. Gottlieb, a partner at the firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, who previously represented the owner of the Washington pizzeria targeted by the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorists and the election workers falsely accused by Rudolph W. Giuliani of aiding a plot to steal the 2020 presidential election.
Universal Music Group, the label behind both Drake and Lamar, responded to the lawsuit last month with a statement that called the claims both untrue and “illogical,” pointing to its longstanding and successful business relationship with Drake.
“We have invested massively in his music and our employees around the world have worked tirelessly for many years to help him achieve historic commercial and personal financial success,” the label said. “Throughout his career, Drake has intentionally and successfully used U.M.G. to distribute his music and poetry to engage in conventionally outrageous back-and-forth ‘rap battles’ to express his feelings about other artists. He now seeks to weaponize the legal process to silence an artist’s creative expression.”
Lawyers for Drake said in a new statement ahead of the Super Bowl: “UMG is masquerading as a champion of artistic freedom by calling its actions merely ‘entertainment’, but there is nothing entertaining about pedophilia or child abuse in the real world.” They added that the evidence “will expose UMG’s gross prioritization of its own corporate profits and executive bonuses over its exclusively signed artists’ well-being and the truth.”