Drake’s legal team says the NFL ban on the word “pedophile” during Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl performance backs the Canadian rapper’s defamation claim against Universal Music Group.
In an amended federal complaint filed Wednesday, April 16, team Drake alleged UMG made investments and took other actions that amplified defamatory claims made in the diss track.
Earlier this year, the NFL banned the use of the word “pedophile” during Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance, when the Compton rapper belted out the crowd pleasing “Not Like Us.”
Related: Super Bowl LIX Scores Record Ratings With Eagles Win and Kendrick Lamar
Drake’s lead attorney Michael Gottlieb at Willkie Farr & Gallagher now says new information prompted his firm to amend a January complaint.
“Drake’s amended complaint makes an already strong case stronger,” Gottlieb said in a statement Thursday to Urban Hollywood 411. “UMG’s PR ‘spin’ and failed efforts to avoid discovery cannot suppress the facts and the truth. With discovery now moving forward, Drake will expose the evidence of UMG’s misconduct, and UMG will be held accountable for the consequences of its ill-conceived decisions.”
The lawsuit says UMG continues to publish the song with the slur in it.
“It was the first, and will hopefully be the last, Super Bowl halftime show orchestrated to assassinate the character of another artist,” Drake’s amended complaint reads.
UMG slammed the amendment in a statement to Variety on Thursday, and said Drake “is being misled by his legal representatives into taking one absurd legal step after another.”
A spokesperson for the rapper fired back and accused the music giant of a “desperate attempt to spin the narrative and deflect from the truth: Drake is holding the largest music conglomerate in the world accountable for its actions and doing so without fear.”
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