This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.
This week: A man who unsuccessfully sued Cardi B over an album cover agrees to repay her $350,000 legal bill; Kesha wins a major appellate ruling in her ongoing defamation battle with Dr. Luke; Dua Lipa’s copyright accusers drop their case for good; and much more.
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THE BIG STORY: Don’t Mess With Cardi B (Or Her Lawyers)
Omar Little, the notorious Baltimore stick-up man who robs drug dealers on HBO’s The Wire, once famously said: “You come at the king, you best not miss.” Well, that same sentiment seems to be increasingly true about Cardi B and her team of lawyers: If you come at her, you better be sure you’re ready for the consequences.
Back in 2017, a guy named Kevin Brophy did exactly that, suing the superstar for millions in damages. His case claimed that Cardi had left him “humiliated” after an image of his enormous back tattoo was inadvertently photoshopped onto the “raunchy” cover of her debut mixtape, Gangsta Bitch Music, Vol. 1.
But now, six years later, it’s Brophy who’s paying Cardi, not the other way around.
Months after a federal jury rejected his lawsuit, Brophy agreed this week to hand over a whopping $350,000 in legal bills that the superstar spent defeating his case. He also agreed to voluntarily end his efforts to revive the case and waived any chance at a future appeal.
Why would he do all that? Go read our full story here to find out.
For Cardi, turning the tables on Brophy is just the latest financial trouncing of a legal opponent.
Late last month, a gossip blogger named Tasha K who made salacious claims against the rapper was forced to file for bankruptcy after Cardi B won more than $3 million in a defamation lawsuit against her. Shortly after Cardi won that verdict, she tweeted “imma come for everything” along with the acronym BBHMM — “bitch better have my money” — and then spent months chasing the cash, including seizing money from Tasha’s YouTube royalty account.
The takeaway? At least when it comes to legal matters: You come at the queen, you best not miss.
Other top stories this week…
KESHA v. DR. LUKE RULING – New York’s top appeals court handed a key victory to Kesha in her legal battle with Dr. Luke, making it more difficult for him to prove at a looming trial that she defamed the producer when she accused him of rape in 2014. The court said Dr. Luke was a “public figure,” meaning he will need to show that Kesha acted with “actual malice” when she made her statements — a notoriously difficult legal hurdle to clear.
DUA LIPA CASE CLOSED – A Florida reggae band called Artikal Sound System decided to drop its copyright case accusing Dua Lipa of copying her smash hit song “Levitating” from their earlier track. The move — a unilateral capitulation, not a confidential cash settlement — came just days after a federal judge cast serious doubt on whether Artikal would be able to prove that Lipa ever even heard the song she was accused of stealing.
JIMMIE ALLEN SUED AGAIN – The country star was hit with a second sexual abuse lawsuit, claiming he assaulted a woman in a Las Vegas hotel room and filmed the encounter without permission. The case came a month after Allen was accused of sexually harassing and raping a woman on his management team. Allen has strongly denied the allegations and has vowed to “mount a vigorous defense.”
TORY LANEZ SENTENCING – Los Angeles prosecutors formally asked a judge to impose a 13-year prison sentence on Tory Lanez after he was convicted last year of shooting Megan Thee Stallion, telling a judge that Lanez had “waged a campaign to humiliate and re-traumatize the victim” in the wake of the 2020 incident. Sentencing had been set for this week but was rescheduled to Aug 7.
MUSIC AS SEX DISCRIMINATION – The Ninth Circuit issued a first-of-its-kind ruling that said blasting music with “sexually graphic” and “violently misogynistic” lyrics in a workplace could violate federal discrimination laws. Reviving a case against a company that played songs like Too $hort‘s “Blowjob Betty” and Eminem‘s “Stan” at its Nevada warehouse, the court said the music potentially created a “hostile or abusive environment.”
COURT RIPS BAD SETTLEMENT – In another big music ruling, the Ninth Circuit overturned a class action settlement in a royalties lawsuit against the relaunched Napster, sharply criticizing an “unreasonable” deal that secured just $53,000 for songwriters while paying their lawyers a whopping $1.7 million in legal fees. The court said that paying attorneys “more than 30 times the amount that the class received” was likely to “make the average person shake her head in disbelief.”
YOUTUBE CASE DROPPED – Just a day before it had been set to go to trial, a Grammy Award-winning composer dropped her closely-watched lawsuit against YouTube over access to its anti-piracy tools like Content ID. The ruling came weeks after a federal judge gutted the case by refusing to let it move forward as a class action — a ruling the composer had said would “gravely undermine” the goals of her lawsuit.
ASTROWORLD GAG ORDER STANDS – A Texas appeals court refused to lift a strict gag order on the lawsuit over the deadly 2021 disaster at Travis Scott‘s Astroworld festival. The court was unmoved by arguments from ABC News, which argued that the “sweeping” restrictions clearly violated the First Amendment’s protections on free speech and had created a “news desert” in which almost no reliable information about an important case is being shared with the public.
COVID RELIEF HIJINKS? The owners of a small Palm Springs, Calif., venue filed a lawsuit against Marc Geiger and his company SaveLive, claiming the former WME agent deceived them into accepting an investment in their venue during the COVID-19 pandemic as part of a ruse to take over the business without paying a fair price.
