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Artist News
Lady Gaga speaks out for Kesha, while Sony says it’s “doing everything it can”
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 26 February 2016
Lady Gaga is the latest high profile artist to speak out in support of Kesha, saying that “no one needs to validate” her fellow singer in a post on Instagram.
Following on from a tweet offering more general support earlier this week, Gaga spoke in more detail about Kesha’s much previously reported legal battle with producer Dr Luke and his Sony-owned record label Kemosabe. Kesha accuses Luke of “mental manipulation, emotional abuse and sexual assault”. Luke denies the allegations.
“The very reason women don’t speak up for years is the fear that no one will believe them, or their abuser has threatened their life or the life of their loved ones/livelihood in order to keep their victim quiet and under their control”, wrote Gaga. “What happened to Kesha has happened to many female artists, including myself, and it will affect her for the rest of her life”.
She continued: “No one needs to validate Kesha. Why is the victim always the ‘liar’? Why do we let people in a position of power get away with behaving inhumanely? These guys hide behind the legal system and it’s their litigious behaviour that is precisely what they use to rape these girls. ‘Give me what I want or else I will come after you’. And they have all the money and resources to do it”.
Gaga was previously pulled into this story in December 2014, after she told Howard Stern in an interview that she had been raped when she was nineteen. She did not name the perpetrator, but Kesha’s lawyer Mark Geragos suggested that it was Dr Luke. Gaga denied that this was the case, and the producer then sued the lawyer for defamation.
A week ago, of course, Kesha was denied a temporary injunction to allow her to break the terms of her contract with Kemosabe in order to record with another producer and label outside the Sony empire, while the legal battle with Luke continues to slowly go through the motions. The request was denied, the judge arguing that it would set a dangerous precedent in New York State contract law, and also that Luke and Sony Music had already agreed that the singer could record with another producer on another of the major’s labels.
The problem with that proposal, Geragos argues, is that there is no certainty that Sony would put any effort into promoting a new Kesha record, because the label, he says, is siding with Dr Luke and therefore does not have her best interests at heart.
A major issue in all of this is that Kesha’s record deal is not with Sony direct, rather it all funnels through another of Dr Luke’s companies, Kasz Money. Those agreements mean that, even under the proposal put forward to allow the singer to continue working on new music elsewhere in the Sony group, Dr Luke would still be able to choose the producer she worked with in his place, and it would be almost impossible to stop the man she accuses of raping her from profiting from her work.
Outlining some of those complications in a statement yesterday, Sony Music’s attorney Scott A Edelman told the New York Times: “Sony has made it possible for Kesha to record without any connection, involvement or interaction with Luke whatsoever, but Sony is not in a position to terminate the contractual relationship between Luke and Kesha. Sony is doing everything it can to support the artist in these circumstances, but is legally unable to terminate the contract to which it is not a party”.
