Drake’s ongoing defamation lawsuit in opposition to his personal document label, Common Music Group (UMG), took one other flip immediately as a choose in New York dominated that his authorized crew can start the invention course of.
At a pre-trial convention on Wednesday morning, Choose Jeanette Vargas decreed that Drake’s representatives can go forward with the method, which is prone to embody deposing key executives and requesting doc manufacturing.
UMG had beforehand requested that the courtroom delay discovery. That movement has now been denied.
In an announcement to The Impartial, Drake’s lead lawyer Michael Gottlieb stated: “Now it is time to see what UMG was so desperately attempting to cover.”
In January, Drake accused UMG of spreading the “false and malicious narrative” that he’s a pedophile with the discharge of Lamar’s tune “Not Like Us”, which incorporates the lyrics: “Say, Drake, I hear you want em’ younger.”
Lamar is just not named within the lawsuit; nonetheless, Drake moreover claimed that UMG knew the accusations have been false however selected company greed over the protection and well-being of its artists.
Final month, UMG branded Drake’s lawsuit a “misguided try and salve his wounds” and requested the rapper’s grievance be “dismissed with out prejudice.”
“Plaintiff, one of the vital profitable recording artists of all time, misplaced a rap battle that he provoked and during which he willingly participated. As an alternative of accepting the loss just like the unbothered rap artist he usually claims to be, he has sued his personal document label in a misguided try and salve his wounds,” learn the movement filed to the US District Court docket for the Southern District of New York.
It went on to recount the small print of Drake and Lamar’s notorious rap battle, which kicked off within the spring of 2024.
“Over the course of roughly two months, they exchanged more and more vitriolic and incendiary ‘diss tracks,’ typically responding inside hours of one another. Drake inspired the feud,” UMG claimed.
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“For instance, when he felt that Lamar was taking too lengthy to reply, Drake launched a second recording during which he goaded Lamar to proceed the general public rap battle. Lamar did simply that, and collectively Drake and Lamar launched a complete of 9 tracks taking intention at one another. A number of commentators declared Lamar to be the ‘winner’ of the battle.”
The submitting additional acknowledged that “Drake has been happy to make use of UMG’s platform to advertise tracks leveling equally incendiary assaults at Lamar, together with, most importantly, that Lamar engaged in home abuse [in his song ‘Family Matters’].”
“However now, after dropping the rap battle, Drake claims that ‘Not Like Us’ is defamatory. It’s not,” it continued.
It argues that as a result of Drake’s lawsuit is nearly totally targeted on “Not Like Us,” it “disregards the opposite Drake and Lamar diss tracks that encompass ‘Not Like Us’ in addition to the conventions of the diss observe style, and, thus, critically ignores the context of the dispute.”
In an announcement shared with The Impartial on the time, Gottlieb known as UMG’s movement “a determined ploy to keep away from accountability.”
