YouTuber Who Defamed Cardi B Files for Bankruptcy to Avoid Paying $4M Verdict
Written by djfrosty on May 30, 2023
Bitch better have my money?
Spoiler alert: She doesn’t.
Eighteen months after Cardi B won a $4 million defamation verdict over salacious claims made by a YouTube host named Tasha K, the gossip blogger has filed for bankruptcy – and she says she has less than $60,000 in total assets to pay out.
In a petition filed Thursday in Florida federal court, Tasha K (real name Latasha Kebe) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, claiming she is unable to pay more than $3.4 million in liabilities that she owes to a number of creditors.
At the top of that list? Belcalis Marlenis Almanzar (Cardi’s legal name), to whom Tasha says she owes $3,380,642 for a “judgment.” That’s because Cardi won a verdict in January 2022 that Tasha had legally defamed the superstar by making false claims about drug use, STDs and prostitution in her YouTube videos.
Shortly after Cardi B won that verdict, she tweeted “imma come for everything” along with the acronym BBHMM – “bitch better have my money.” But Thursday’s petition makes clear that the star is unlikely to see much of that money any time soon.
Tasha lists just $58,595 in total assets to her name, and the vast majority of that comes from a 2021 Chevrolet Silverado that’s tied as collateral to an unpaid auto loan. She listed only $11,750 in other property, including two Louis Vuitton purses, and just $95 in actual cash in her bank account. She counts the trademark to her “UnWineWithTashaK” YouTube channel as an asset, but says the value of the brand is “unknown.”
Attorneys for Cardi B, who have been legally pursuing the money for months, did not immediately return a request for comment.
Cardi sued Tasha in 2019, over what the rapper’s lawyers called a “malicious campaign” on social media and YouTube aimed at hurting Cardi’s reputation. The star’s attorneys said they had repeatedly tried – and failed – to get her to pull her videos down.
One Tasha video cited in the lawsuit includes a statement that Cardi had done sex acts “with beer bottles on f—ing stripper stages.” Others videos said the superstar had contracted herpes; that she had been a prostitute; that she had cheated on her husband; and that she had done hard drugs.
Following a trial in January, jurors sided decisively with Cardi B, holding Tasha liable for defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. They ordered her and her company to pay than $2.5 million in damages and another $1.3 million in legal fees incurred by Cardi. Tasha appealed the verdict last summer, but a federal appeals court easily rejected that request in March.
Tasha has vowed to keep fighting the case “all the way to the Supreme Court if need be,” even if it “takes years” to do so. But Thursday’s bankruptcy will impose an automatic pause on all litigation while the insolvency proceedings are carried out. And given her lack of resources, it seems unlikely that she will be able to afford the expense of continuing to seek to overturn the verdict.
Tasha’s company, Kebe Studios LLC, is solely on the hook for $500,000 of the judgment. It does not appear that the company itself has yet filed for bankruptcy, or if such proceedings will be handled as part of Tasha’s case.
Beyond her assets and liabilities, Thursdays’ bankruptcy filing includes other interesting information about Cardi’s nemesis. The blogger says that $10,000 in her “Google account” – a reference to YouTube’s parent company – was already garnished last year by the superstar’s attorneys. She also says that she and her husband earned a combined income from their work (both are listed as “content creators”) of $156,021 in 2021 and $134,861 in 2022, and that they make more than $30,000 per month currently.
An attorney for Tasha did not immediately return a request for comment.