Drake’s lawyers have already hit back at Universal Music’s motion to dismiss his defamation lawsuit over Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’. They also urge the judge overseeing the case to not pause a discovery process via which Drake wants to see Lamar’s record contracts and information about how senior Universal execs are bonused.
Drake sued Universal, his long-time label, in January, accusing it of defamation for its role in releasing ‘Not Like Us’, the standout record in a series of back and forth diss tracks that he and Lamar put out last year.
The lawsuit claimed that Lamar’s portrayal of Drake as “a criminal pedophile”, and his suggestion that the public “should resort to vigilante justice in response”, both destroyed Drake’s reputation and jeopardised the safety of both him and his family.
In a letter to the court, Drake’s attorneys say that Universal’s motion to dismiss, filed earlier this week, completely ignores a crucial factor in this dispute: while Lamar’s allegations that Drake is a pedophile may have come in the lyrics of a diss track, which people aren’t meant to believe, millions of people nevertheless assumed that Lamar was making a factual statement.
Universal, says the letter from Drake’s team, according to Billboard, “completely ignores” Drake’s allegation that “millions of people, all over the world” believed that Lamar was making a “factual assertion” that Drake “is a pedophile”.
Not only that, but Universal’s motion to dismiss also fails to deal with claims in Drake’s lawsuit that “the statements in question”, and the context in which Lamar made them, implied that Lamar’s allegations were based on “undisclosed evidence” and his audience “understood” that.
That latter point seemingly alludes to this statement in Drake’s original legal filing: “Less than a week before the release of ‘Not Like Us’, UMG released another song by Kendrick Lamar - ‘Euphoria’ - that threatened that he ‘won’t tell truths bout’ Drake, if Drake ‘don’t tell no lie about me’, and ominously stated that he ‘know some shit’ about Drake’”.
“To the reasonable listener”, the lawsuit continues, that heavily implied that “any future allegations levied by Lamar against Drake would be based in ‘truth’ and undisclosed fact, not rumour or opinion”.
As a result, “immediately after the release” of ‘Not Like Us’, “people all over the internet began repeating the allegations against Drake, believing them to be statements of fact. These posts number in at least the hundreds of thousands”.
In its motion for dismissal, Universal basically said that Drake is a thin-skinned hypocrite, happy to use Universal’s distribution platform to put out his own tracks making wild claims about his rival, but now going legal just because he’s bitter that everyone agrees Lamar won last year’s rap battle.
It also argued that, in the context of a diss track and rap battle, Lamar’s lyrical statements about Drake, including those accusing him of being a pedophile, were “non-actionable opinion and rhetorical hyperbole”, and therefore not defamatory.
Shortly after filing its motion for dismissal, Universal also asked the court to pause the discovery process in this dispute until the judge has considered its dismissal arguments.
A previous attempt by Universal to pause discovery failed, but in a new letter to the court it said a “stay of discovery” was now justified because it “has presented substantial arguments that Drake’s claims should be dismissed in their entirety”.
A temporary pause to the discovery process wouldn’t prejudice Drake in any way, it added, while going ahead with discovery now - when the whole lawsuit may yet be dismissed on summary judgement - would be a major inconvenience for the record company.
Not least because “Drake has requested broad discovery”, seeking access to lots of documents and information, the provision of which would “impose undue burden on UMG”. Drake is also seeking access to “confidential, proprietary, and highly commercially sensitive documents”, Universal’s letter revealed.
That includes, “all contracts between UMG and Kendrick Lamar”, as well as documents showing “the executive compensation structure and annual incentive plans” for the boss of Universal’s Interscope division - and potential successor to Lucian Grainge in the top job at the major - John Janick, plus “Interscope’s 2024 executive incentive metrics, targets, projections and performance used to determine annual incentive compensation for Interscope’s executives and officers”.
It was in response to the latest request to pause discovery that Drake’s lawyers hit out at Universal’s arguments for requesting that the defamation lawsuit be dismissed, giving us a preview of the counter arguments they will employ when they file a full response to the motion for dismissal in the coming weeks.
On the request to pause discovery, Drake’s lawyers say the major has “not come close” to showing that proceeding with the discovery process now would impose that “undue burden”. Universal, they add, “has not stated how long it expects discovery to take, the costs associated with discovery, or any other indicator that might demonstrate why discovery will be overly burdensome”.