The long running legal dispute between Chance The Rapper and Pat The Manager climaxed with all the drama of a jury trial earlier this year, with the jury basically siding with the rapper.
However, some elements of the dispute weren’t actually resolved at that trial, which means both Chance and Pat are back in court in Chicago this week to deal with those other matters. This time it’s a slightly duller ‘bench trial’ where the judge is the decision maker. The rapper, real name Chancelor Bennett, testified yesterday.
This hearing relates to Bennett’s claims that his ex-manager, Pat Corcoran, failed to fulfil the ‘fiduciary duty’ that he owed his client in his management role.
In particular, Bennett claims Corcoran inserted himself as a beneficiary in deals that were only meant to benefit his client. Which means - Bennett said in court yesterday - his manager was abusing their artist/manager relationship “to enrich himself and get a certain influence in the industry”.
It was Corcoran who initiated the legal battle with Bennett, suing for allegedly unpaid commissions after being sacked by the rapper in 2020. Bennett responded with his own lawsuit which included these fiduciary duty claims. Yesterday he explained how Corcoran’s lawsuit prompted him to dig into his past business dealings, which is how he discovered his ex-manager’s alleged bad conduct.
According to Law360, he talked to the judge about how Corcoran approached two specific deals, with ad agency The Times and Chicago’s Ramova Theater, explaining that it was “confusing and heartbreaking” to discover that his manager had previously misrepresented those transactions to him, something “I would have never probably been able to find out, save for Pat filing his lawsuit”.
In previous legal filings, Bennett said that the founders of The Times agency approached Corcoran in early 2019 to discuss involving the rapper in their soon-to-launch company, including as a shareholder. But Corcoran, it’s claimed, told the founders he would only pass the proposal onto Bennett if he received the same equity interest too. “A demand he never disclosed to Mr Bennett”, the legal filings state.
Then in late 2019 or early 2020, “individuals working to renovate and revive Chicago’s historic Ramova Theater contacted Mr Corcoran to offer Mr Bennett an equity interest” in the venue. Again Corcoran insisted that he was also cut into the deal, but “Mr Corcoran lied to Mr Bennett about the nature of this opportunity, falsely representing that the equity interest had always been offered to both men”.
During yesterday’s court hearing, Bennett added, “none of those times did he ever say, ‘originally, this was just for you and I asked for another percentage’ or ‘they offered me another percentage’”. Instead he “almost” presented the opportunities as if he had initiated them, and that he “was doing me a favour by including me”.
In his original lawsuit, Corcoran insisted he was owed $3.8 million in unpaid commissions after being sacked by Bennett, $1.6 million of which stemmed from a sunset clause that he claimed was part of his unwritten deal with the rapper. That clause would allow Corcoran to continue commissioning on some revenue streams for three years after he stopped working with Bennett.
However, back in March the jury ruled against Corcoran on the commissions claim, concluding there was no sunset clause in his unwritten management contract with Bennett. They also accepted some of the rapper’s additional legal claims against the manager, but only awarded him a token gesture $35 in damages.
Corcoran denies all the allegations of misconduct and is due to explain why Bennett’s claims are unfounded in court today.