Drake last week sat for a deposition with lawyers working on the Astroworld litigation, according to sources who have spoken to Rolling Stone.
Little is known about the deposition because of a wide-ranging gagging order that covers all the lawsuits that were filed in the wake of the 2021 Astroworld tragedy. Drake joined Astroworld founder Travis Scott on stage towards the end of his headline set at the November 2021 festival. It was during that set that ten people died and hundreds more were injured in a crowd surge.
That guest spot meant that Drake was named as a defendant in some of the hundreds of lawsuits that were filed following the tragedy. In subsequent legal filings, he has stressed that he had no involvement in or knowledge of the organisation of the ill-fated festival. During last week's deposition he would have answered questions under oath, presumably about what he saw and heard as he waited to go on stage for his guest spot during Scott's set.
Scott previously sat for a deposition in September and, reportedly, again in October. It was around the time of the first deposition that it emerged that lawyers working on the litigation were struggling to get access to Scott's electronic communications from before and after the festival.
That was partly because the musician lost his mobile phone in January 2022 when it fell off a boat in the Gulf Of Mexico and he hadn't backed anything up to the cloud because of "hacking concerns". Although Scott's lawyers subsequently said that messages between him and his manager David Stromberg stored on the latter's phone should cover most if not all of the relevant conversations.
Hundreds of lawsuits were filed following Astroworld 2021, including by the families of those who died. Some of the latter have since settled their litigation, but most of the lawsuits continue to go through the motions. A grand jury, meanwhile, concluded that there were no grounds for pursuing criminal proceedings in relation to the tragedy.