Beats Music co-founder and former Apple Music executive Larry Jackson’s artist services company Gamma has filed a defamation lawsuit against the unknown operators of a website that mainly exists to make outlandish claims about him and his company. Some of those allegations concern Gamma’s work releasing Kanye West’s comeback album ‘Bully’ - launched shortly after West took out a full page advert in the Wall Street Journal disavowing his earlier antisemitism and championing of Nazism.
The Gamma lawsuit also alleges that a coordinated bot network has been used to give the defamatory website prominence within the music industry - and implies that a competitor may be behind the whole operation.
The offending website goes by the name Scamma.Exposed and uses two domains: larryjacksonexposed.com and gammaexposed.com.
Its home page currently declares that “leaked messages prove how Larry ‘Scammson’ Jackson and Gamma Music Group faked sales, botched clearances, sparked label wars and left Ye fighting alone while they scrambled behind the scenes”.
The site is very obviously built and written by AI, stuffed full of breathless AI tropes including “the silent unfollow is the loudest receipt”, “the pattern is undeniable”, “the autonomy is a mirage” and other similar slop.
In a defamation lawsuit filed with the courts in New York, Gamma says it is seeking to “identify and hold accountable the anonymous individual or individuals” responsible for this “coordinated, malicious and ongoing campaign targeting Gamma and its business operations, its co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Lawrence (Larry) Jackson, and its artists”.
According to Gamma’s lawsuit, Scamma.Exposed is a relatively recent endeavour, going live on or around 23 Apr after Bloomberg published “a positive and factually grounded story” about the company. The website has since been heavily promoted via regular posts on X and Reddit.
Those are the result of what Gamma says was a co-ordinated bot campaign. On 25 and 26 Apr hundreds of accounts on X - all created in December and with no other activity - posted links to or reposts of the site’s content, all within a twelve-minute window. The filing names a string of those accounts, and adds that “a Reddit account using the handle ‘Judith_Ackee’ was identified as posting identical language to that found on the websites. That account has since been banned by Reddit”.
The bot push aimed to draw attention to the allegations made by the site within the industry, with Gamma citing a Page Six article from 7 May which reported that the site had been “passed around the music industry’s C-suites”.
Gamma’s lawsuit also lists some specific “false and defamatory statements” published on the Scamma.Exposed site, including that Gamma employed “bot fraud’ to boost ‘Bully’ sales and streams; that Jackson is “running out of money” and “down to his last 10 million of the 100 million he raised”; that he was “embezzling investor funds for private flights”; and that he “paid for a Billboard front cover claiming he raised $1 billion”.
The site also claims that Gamma was “laundering” Mariah Carey’s money and that both Carey and Usher have quietly left the company. Gamma says all of these statements are false.
Jackson founded Gamma as a creator and artist services business back in 2023 following a stint as Global Creative Director at Apple Music after the consumer tech giant gobbled up Beats, the headphone brand Jackson co-founded with Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre, and which had a streaming service that later became Apple Music. Prior to Apple, Jackson worked in the major label system at both Sony Music and Universal Music.
His decision to work with West on ‘Bully’ was not without controversy. Prior to his most recent releases and concerts, West published that big apology about his past antisemitic statements and conduct in the Wall Street Journal. However, plenty of people have been understandably cynical about the sincerity of that apology and critical of those music companies that have newly partnered with the rapper.
While you might think Jackson’s decision to work with West could be a motivating factor for setting up the defamatory website, that’s not necessarily the case, given stories posted on the site criticise the Gamma boss for not doing enough for the rapper.
“Larry Jackson positioned himself as Ye’s partner at Gamma”, one such post states, before adding, “instead he created a perfect storm: fake Billboard promises, clearance disasters with Atlantic, and full office panic when the numbers came in”.
The legal filing seeks to hold whoever is behind Scamma.Exposed liable for defamation, trade libel and injurious falsehood. But it also includes an unfair competition claim, which alleges that the defendants are “seeking to gain a competitive advantage in the entertainment marketplace by destroying Gamma’s reputation and diverting its business relationships to rival companies”.
The lawsuit has been filed against unnamed “Doe Defendants” under a New York procedural rule that allows you to sue people whose identities you don’t yet know, meaning that Gamma can use legal process to force disclosure of who registered the domain names and ran the bot accounts. Once Gamma has names, it can amend its complaint accordingly.
However, that unmasking may not be entirely straightforward. Both domains were registered on 20 Apr - three days before the site went live - using a domain registration service called Njalla, based in Costa Rica, which describes itself as “the world’s most notorious ‘privacy as a service’ for domains”.
Njalla - which was founded by Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay - sells its service based on extreme anonymity, saying that “the most interesting people that use our services are the ones that make us have to go to court to protect them”. A core part of Njalla’s offering is that “when you register a domain name in our system, we can register with our own data. We will be the actual registrant of the domain”.
In 2020, Njalla was added to the USTR ‘notorious markets’ list for offering privacy protection for domain registrations, and in 2025 the European Commission added it to its counterfeit and piracy watchlist. Which means that Njalla is designed to resist - or at least make much harder - exactly the sort of legal discovery that Gamma is now pursuing.
Even if Gamma’s lawyers secure a court order in New York, enforcing it against a Costa Rican company with no US presence and no obligation to comply with American civil subpoenas would be a challenge in itself, and the only way to compel Njalla to cooperate might be to get a local Costa Rican court order. Even then, given Njalla accepts payment via various cryptocurrencies including Monero, it may not be able to share any meaningful information about who has registered the domains.
There is, of course, a certain irony that infrastructure created by the founder of The Pirate Bay is being used to shield an attack on a music company - though whether Gamma’s lawyers will appreciate that irony is another matter.
Gamma says in its filing that it “has no choice but to fight back” against those who “weaponise technology to destroy reputations and livelihoods behind a veil of anonymity”. The filing adds that artists and labels have “increasingly been subjected to digital stalking, harassment campaigns and organised libellous attacks across various online platforms”, suffering “significant financial, reputational and emotional harm”. But when it comes to this particular campaign, says Gamma, “enough is enough”.
