Lawsuit
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A federal judge ruled Wednesday (May 29) that a sprawling copyright lawsuit can move forward with accusations that nearly 2,000 reggaeton songs — including hits by Bad Bunny, Karol G and dozens of others — all infringed a single 1989 song that allegedly spawned the so-called “dem bow” rhythm.
The huge infringement case, filed by Cleveland “Clevie” Browne and the heirs of Wycliffe “Steely” Johnson, claims that their 1989 song, “Fish Market,” was the source of dem bow — the boom-ch-boom-chick, boom-ch-boom-chick percussion featured in nearly every reggaeton song.
Demanding that the case be dismissed, Bad Bunny’s lawyers argued last year that Steely & Clevie’s massive case “seeks to monopolize practically the entire reggaetón musical genre for themselves” by claiming copyright control over “unprotectable” musical elements.
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But in the lawsuit’s first key decision, Judge André Birotte Jr. denied that motion on Wednesday, ruling that it was too early in the case to make those kinds of complex rulings and that Steely & Clevie had made a strong enough argument to move forward: “It is premature at this stage to find that the musical elements alleged are insufficiently original or indeed unprotectable.”
Notably, the judge also hinted that he might not be particularly receptive to such arguments when it’s time to rule on them. At one point, he warned that he “rejects” the idea that the massive success of a particular song could be used as a “double-edged sword” that would also void its copyrights.
“The court recognizes the practice of musical borrowing, and in doing so, cannot merely conclude that because the reggaeton genre (or artists) have purportedly borrowed significantly from attributes of plaintiffs’ work that those attributes are now in effect commonplace elements,” Judge Birotte wrote.
First filed in 2021 against just a handful of defendants, Steely & Clevie’s lawsuit has steadily grown to cover more and more artists and songs. In the latest iteration, the duo’s lawyers name more than 150 artists, also including Pitbull, Drake, Daddy Yankee, Luis Fonsi and Justin Bieber, plus units of all three major music companies.
Steely & Clevie’s lawyers claim that over 1,800 reggaetón songs featuring iterations of the dem bow rhythm were, at root, illegally copied from “Fish Market” — and that their clients deserve monetary compensation for them. Potentially damages are difficult to calculate, but could easily reach into the billions if the case is successful.
In Wednesday’s decision, Judge Birotte also rejected other arguments from the defendants beyond the core question of whether dem bow could be protected by copyright law.
For instance, in a June filing, attorneys for Daddy Yankee and the major labels argued that the case was so massive that it had become procedurally unfair. They called it a “shotgun pleading,” filled with so many vague accusations that it was “impossible for defendants to determine what each is alleged to have done.”
But in Wednesday’s decision, Judge Birotte said he was “unconvinced” by that argument — and that Steely & Clevie’s 228-page complaint had sufficiently laid out the case to satisfy procedural requirements.
Following Wednesday’s ruling, the case will proceed toward discovery, where both sides will exchange evidence, take depositions and seek expert testimony on complex questions relating to musicology. If the judge does not decide the case after discovery, the two sides will head to trial.
Neither side in the case immediately returned requests for comment.
Cher has won her lawsuit against Sonny Bono’s widow over royalties to “I Got You Babe” and other hits after a federal judge ruled that Mary Bono must continue paying the superstar her cut under the couple’s decades-old divorce settlement.
More than 20 years after Sonny’s death, Mary argued that she no longer needed to pay royalties to Cher thanks to copyright law’s so-called termination right — a provision of federal law that allows songwriters and their heirs to win back control of their intellectual property rights decades after they gave them away.
But in a decision issued Wednesday (May 29), Judge John A. Kronstadt ruled that the federal termination rules do not trump Sonny and Cher’s 1978 divorce settlement, which gave the singer a permanent 50% cut of the publishing revenue from songs written before the couple split up.
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The ruling means that Cher will continue to receive publishing royalties for her catalog of songs created with Sonny, including “The Beat Goes On” and “Baby Don’t Go.” According to Wednesday’s ruling, more than $400,000 in royalties owed to Cher have piled up since the dispute began.
Neither side’s attorneys immediately returned requests for comment.
Sonny and Cher started performing together in 1964 and married in 1967, rising to fame with major hits like “I Got You Babe,” “The Beat Goes On” and “Baby Don’t Go.” But the pair split up in 1974, finalizing their divorce with a settlement in 1978. Under that deal, Sonny retained ownership of their music rights, but Cher was granted a half-share of all publishing royalties in perpetuity.
That agreement stayed in effect for years, including after Bono died in a 1998 skiing accident. But in 2016, Mary and other heirs invoked the termination right, seeking to take back control of Sonny’s copyrights from his publishers. And in 2021, they informed Cher that they would soon stop paying royalties under the earlier agreement.
Cher quickly sued, seeking a ruling that she was still owed her 50% cut regardless of who owns the copyrights since a federal copyright provision had no bearing on a state-law asset settlement. Mary fired back a few months later, claiming that termination rights could not be waived by contract and that Cher’s arguments would “subvert” the purpose of the law.
In Wednesday’s ruling, Judge Kronstadt sided with Cher’s arguments. He ruled that the divorce settlement with Sonny gave Cher a “contractual right to receive financial compensation,” rather than the kind of control over his copyrights that could be voided using the termination right: “A right to receive royalties is distinct from a grant of copyright,” the judge wrote.
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Beyoncé and Big Freedia are the subject of a new lawsuit. A group claims the two lifted elements from their project for “Break My Soul”.
As reported by Digital Music News a four person music collective feels that their work has been infringed upon by Beyoncé. Back in 2002 Da Showstoppaz recorded a single titled “Release A Wiggle” as per a suggestion from one of their colleagues. Surprisingly the song started to pick up traction in their local neighborhood in New Orleans and the group started to perform shows. The group would dissolve in 2004 after Hurricane Katrina ravished the city.
“Break My Soul” features some words from Big Freedia where she says “Release ya wiggle” multiple times on the outro. This single also samples Big Freedia’s 2014 track “Explode” where the Bounce Music pioneer says “Release ya wiggle” throughout the chorus. According to the filing submitted on behalf the group both works infringe on their break out song. “‘Explode’ infringes on Da Showstoppaz’ ‘Release A Wiggle’ twelve times,” the document reads. “As the infringing phrase ‘release yo’ wiggle’ and several other substantially similar phrases are featured prominently in the song. Any reasonable person listening to ‘Release A Wiggle’ and ‘Explode’ would conclude that the songs are substantially similar.”
Neither Beyoncé or Big Freedia have yet to publicly address the matter. You can listen to “Explode” and Da Showstoppaz “Release A Wiggle” and compare below.
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The Department of Justice dropped a wide-ranging antitrust complaint against Live Nation on Thursday (May 23), highlighting more than a dozen examples of the company’s “anticompetitive and exclusionary” behavior in accusing it of operating live music’s largest monopoly.
The evidence looks particularly bad for Live Nation chief executive Michael Rapino, whose own emails are being used against him to document alleged threats made against competitors while the company was operating under a federal consent decree tied to its 2010 merger with Live Nation.
Under the arrangement, regulators with the government had the right to obtain company documents, including communications, without a subpoena. The most damaging evidence is an email exchange involving Oak View Group’s Tim Leiweke and mega music manager Irving Azoff, who co-founded the arena development and management company together.
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Leiweke was the CEO of AEG, Live Nation’s main rival in the concert business, until 2012, when he was fired by company owner Phil Anschutz. After a brief stint running the Toronto Maple Leafs and its sports and entertainment interests in Canada, he returned to the United States and eventually founded Oak View Group (OVG) in 2015.
The government claims Rapino tried to leverage his company’s partnership with OVG to pressure private equity firm Silver Lake to kill off a rival ticketing company that Rapino allegedly believed represented a major threat to Ticketmaster.
If true, the story could be a major problem for Rapino, underscoring the government narrative that despite Live Nation’s massive market share, the CEO operates the company like a paranoid pugilist, willing to cross ethical and legal boundaries to eliminate tiny threats.
Silver Lake has been OVG’s strategic investment partner since the company’s founding, investing $100 million to launch it. Today, it has more than $2.5 billion tied up in OVG development projects. Silver Lake also owns TEG, an Australian concert promotion company that operates Ticketek, a large Australian ticket provider with more than 130 clients.
According to the 120-page complaint filed Thursday in federal court, “In 2021, Live Nation’s CEO complained to Oak View Group’s co-founder that TEG was ‘[f]ull on competitors.’ Oak View Group, in turn, conveyed to Silver Lake that Live Nation was ‘not happy.’” The complaint adds that Rapino then escalated his complaints to Silver Lake directly, stating: “I am all in on [Oak View Group] where the big play lies with venues – why insult me with this investment in ticketing/promotions etc.’”
According to the lawsuit, “Rapino threatened to pull its support from Oak View Group and instead back an Oak View Group competitor unless TEG stopped competing with Live Nation in the United States,” the complaint alleges.
“I can assure you the OVG investment is a much bigger win then T[E]G,” Rapino wrote in an email to an unnamed Silver Lake executive that’s included in the lawsuit. “It’s been a huge win for both sides– we have over 20 global arenas in development that neither could do without the other … do you really want LN backing [AEG’s venue development and management company]…? Seems like a dumb trade off??”
To aid in the pressure campaign, Azoff “reportedly refused to allow TEG to promote any of his large roster of artist clients,” the complaint alleges. It further states that Azoff told Rapino “that he was going to demand that Silver Lake sell TEG. [To which] Live Nation’s CEO replied ‘Love ya.’”
“Silver Lake now seems ‘intent on dumping teg’ and has asked, through the founder of Oak View Group, whether Live Nation would be interested in purchasing TEG,” the complaint reads in describing the back-and-forth.
Live Nation did not purchase TEG, but in early 2023, a deal was brokered for Silver Lake to sell the company to investment companies Blackstone and KKR. That deal collapsed in October over disagreements over the valuation of the company, which is now being readied for an IPO in Australia.
Live Nation issued a statement on this allegation, stating that the “claim reveals not only a disregard for the facts, but also deep hypocrisy.”
“The current DOJ and FTC have been vocal critics of private equity companies making multiple investments in the same industry because of competitive ‘entanglements,’” the statement continues. “So was Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino when, after it had already made an investment in OVG, Silver Lake Partners decided to invest in the Australian live entertainment company, TEG. Rapino’s complaint was fundamentally the same as the DOJ/FTC concern with private equity rollups: it created a conflict between OVG, which had become a close partner to Live Nation, and TEG. So, in December 2021 when a TEG employee wrote to say that it did not intend to compete with Live Nation in the U.S., Rapino replied to Silver Lake’s management that he did not care about TEG, but still had a problem with Silver Lake’s decision to make multiple conflicting investments in the industry.”
The statement also claims that “there is no truth that this brief exchange had anything to do with Silver Lake’s decision to sell its stake in TEG.”
In addition to the allegations around TEG, the government’s complaint further alleges that OVG, when it was first founded in 2015, was “particularly well-suited to be a real competitor to Live Nation in the United States concert promotion business” but changed its model to avoid competing with Live Nation.
The evidence from the time, however, shows that OVG and Live Nation had long billed themselves as partners. A November 2015 press release announcing OVG’s launch includes a quote from Rapino endorsing Leiweke’s business model, stating, “Both Tim and Irving are friends of Live Nation as well as personal friends. The concept of creating an economic model for both arena’s and touring artists that creates new revenue streams and develops an ‘anchor’ type of platform for music is one we share.”
The DOJ claims that Live Nation initially identified OVG as one of its “Biggest Competitor Threats” but that over time, the two firms morphed “from competitors into partners who found it easier and mutually beneficial to work together rather than compete.”
According to the government, OVG in fact operates as “a self-described ‘pimp’ and ‘hammer’ for Live Nation, with Leiweke once telling Rapino ‘[j]ust like I tell our folks we 100% always protect you and LN on your lanes.’”
In 2016, “after learning that Oak View Group offered to promote an artist Live Nation had previously promoted, Live Nation’s CEO immediately emailed Oak View Group, warning that such competition would only lead to artists demanding more compensation,” reads the complaint. It further includes an email in which Rapino wrote of the artist: “Whats up? We have done his [touring] and vegas[.] Let’s make sure we don’t let [the artist agency] now start playing us off.”
As outlined in the complaint, Leiweke immediately responded, “Our guys got a bit ahead. All know we don’t promote and we only do tours with Live Nation.”
Azoff later chimed in, writing “Growing pains,” subsequently noting that OVG executives “should never discuss comp [for artists],” and that OVG’s talent buyers would work for Live Nation.
The government argues that this discussion is an example of Leiweke and Azoff colluding with Rapino to limit the competitive bids sent to an artist in order to keep artists fees low. In another example cited in the complaint from 2022, Rapino admonished Leweike for making a direct offer to an artist to play an OVG venue instead of asking Live Nation to promote the show for OVG.
“Who would be so stupid to do this and play into [the artist agent’s] arms”? Rapino asked Leiweke in the email. Leiweke responded, “We have never promoted without you. Won’t,” before later writing, “[m]ore than happy to do these deals thru LN as I have always been aligned,” and that “I never want to be competitors.”
The complaint also alleges that Live Nation “exploits its long-term relationship with Oak View Group to flip venues to Ticketmaster, further cementing Ticketmaster’s power.”
According to the DOJ, in 2022, Live Nation and OVG signed an unspecified agreement that resulted in OVG recognizing “it has a significant financial interest in maintaining existing Ticketmaster contracts at its venues and converting other venues to Ticketmaster.”
At some point, according to the lawsuit, Leiweke told Rapino that the deal “allows us to tie up all owned and operated facilities to 10 year deals, develop a standard A and B market deal for all future projects and to convert all OVG 360 deals to TM now or as they expire for 10 years… Appreciate the consideration and partnership and all of us will work diligently on this so we are always aligned with TM.”
Live Nation responded to this claim in a statement: “The theory is that the contract gave Ticketmaster an unfair advantage in securing the business of independent venues that were managed by OVG because it creates financial incentives for OVG to ‘advocate for’ Ticketmaster. But there is nothing remotely anticompetitive about that. Commercial arrangements that involve incentive or marketing payments are common throughout this industry (and many others).” The statement adds, “Ticketmaster competed and won the contract on the merits because OVG determined it was the best ticketing system available.”
Kelly Clarkson has settled a lawsuit against her ex-husband Brandon Blackstock over commissions he was paid during his time as her manager, according to a new report in Rolling Stone.
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Clarkson requested a dismissal of the case on Tuesday (May 21), while Blackstock and his father’s management firm, Starstruck Entertainment, requested to dismiss the case on Wednesday (May 22), according to court documents reviewed by Billboard — though the documents do not mention a settlement.
Billboard has reached out to Clarkson and Blackstock’s reps for more information but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
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The reported settlement comes two months after Clarkson filed a case in Los Angeles courton March 14 seeking a ruling that Starstruck Entertainment had been violating state labor rules stemming from the start of their relationship. The lawsuit sought the return of “any and all commissions, fees, profits, advances, producing fees or other monies” she paid to Starstruck Entertainment dating all the way back to 2007.
Clarkson filed for divorce from Blackstock in June 2020 after seven years of marriage. The case was finalized in 2022, and the singer agreed to pay her ex-husband monthly child support of $45,601 for their two children — nine-year-old daughter River Rose and eight-year-old son Remy Alexander — plus a one-time payment of $1.3 million.
Shortly after Clarkson filed for divorce, Starstruck sued her for alleged unpaid fees, claiming the company had “invested a great deal of time, money, energy, and dedication” into her and had “developed Clarkson into a mega superstar.”
In response, Clarkson filed a complaint with California’s Labor Commissioner, claiming that Blackstock and Starstruck had violated California’s Talent Agencies Act by serving as her managers as well as unlicensed talent agents who booked her business deals. In November, a Labor Commissioner ruled in Clarkson’s favor and Blackstock was ordered to repay Clarkson more than $2.6 million in commissions she paid him for handling a number of deals, including her role as a coach on The Voice. A month later, Blackstock and Starstruck challenged the ruling in court, asking for a Los Angeles judge to rule rather than the Labor Commissioner.
A Department of Justice lawsuit against Live Nation for violating U.S. antitrust laws is imminent and could be filed as soon as Thursday (May 23), a source with knowledge of the DOJ’s plans tells Billboard.
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The lawsuit is rumored to charge that Live Nation has a monopoly on event ticketing through Ticketmaster and that it illegally uses its monopoly power to grow its business and stifle competition. The DOJ has been investigating Live Nation for more than two years. With that investigation now wrapped, company president Joe Berchtold recently said he was that he was hopeful his company would avoid a legal showdown with the DOJ’s top antitrust lawyer, Jonathan Kanter.
“These are always serious discussions. We wouldn’t get to this point if they didn’t have concerns, but the good news is we’re still talking and they’ve said they have an open mind,” Berchtold told attendees at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications conference in Boston on Tuesday (May 21).
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“Without getting into the real details of the conversation, I think it’s fair to say I continue to believe that we fundamentally have business practices that are fully defensible,” Berchtold added, before continuing: “We’re also open to figuring out common ground in order to get this settled and moved on. But we don’t know exactly what they want at this point still.”
Live Nation declined to comment for this story.
The Department of Justice’s case is believed to be centered around Ticketmaster’s use of exclusive ticketing contracts when signing up venues for its ticketing services. Typically, Ticketmaster pays venues an advance on the revenue that it generates from the fees it charges consumers as part of the ticket-buying process. The longer the contract, the larger the advance Ticketmaster can pay out.
DOJ officials don’t like the practice, arguing that it locks out new companies from competing in the ticketing space. Ticketmaster officials, however, argue that they are open to working with non-exclusive contracts — both the Greek Theatre in Hollywood and Red Rocks in Denver are open facilities where promoters use the ticketing provider of their choice — but that venues often rely on exclusive deals to meet their capital needs.
While Ticketmaster holds more exclusive ticketing contracts than any other company, it isn’t the only one to make use of them: Every major competitor pays upfront advances in exchange for exclusive ticketing agreements with venues and sports teams.
That includes SeatGeek, which reportedly paid $10 million in 2021 for exclusive rights to ticket events at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for a seven-year term. Two years into the agreement, Billboard reported at the time, Barclays Center and BSE Global chief executive Sam Zussman threatened to publicize SeatGeek’s tech problems and breaches of contract if it didn’t immediately agree to terminate the deal.
SeatGeek eventually agreed to wind down its relationship with Barclays Center and was replaced by Ticketmaster. DOJ officials reportedly scrutinized the incident during its investigation of Live Nation.
Beyoncé, Sony Music and others are facing a copyright lawsuit over her chart-topping hit “Break My Soul,” filed by a New Orleans group that says she sampled from a Big Easy rapper who had illegally lifted lyrics from their earlier song.
In a complaint filed Wednesday (May 22) in Louisiana federal court, members of Da Showstoppaz accuse Beyoncé (Beyoncé Knowles Carter) of infringing their 2002 song “Release A Wiggle” on “Break My Soul,” which spent two weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 in 2022.
Rather than stealing their material directly, the group alleges that Beyoncé infringed their copyrights by legally sampling the 2014 song “Explode” by the New Orleans rapper Big Freedia. That track, they say, illegally borrowed several key lyrics from their song.
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“While Mrs. Carter … and others have received many accolades and substantial profits … Da Showstoppaz’s have received nothing—no acknowledgment, no credit, no remuneration of any kind,” the group’s attorneys wrote, also naming Big Freedia (Freddie Ross) as a defendant.
“Explode” was one of several high-profile samples on “Break My Soul,” which also heavily pulled from Robin S.‘s house song “Show Me Love.” After the release of the song, Big Freedia thanked “Queen Beyoncé” and said she had been “honored to be a part of this special moment.”
At the center of the new dispute is the phrase “release yo wiggle” and several related variants, which Da Showstoppaz call “unique phrases” that they coined in their song. They say Big Freedia — a well-known rapper in New Orleans’ bounce music scene — infringed their copyrights by using similar phrases in “Explode.”
“The infringing phrase ‘release yo’ wiggle’ and several other substantially similar phrases are featured prominently in the song and evenly spread out across Explode’s two-minute and forty-seven second runtime,” the group’s lawyers wrote. “Any reasonable person listening to ‘Release A Wiggle’ and ‘Explode’ would conclude that the songs are substantially similar.”
Such allegations could face long odds in court. Copyright law typically does not protect short, simple phrases, and a court could potentially dismiss the case on the grounds that Big Freedia was free to use such lyrics even if The Showstoppaz used them first.
But the group’s lawyers aren’t concerned, saying they “have a copyright to their unique and distinctive lyrics” that was clearly infringed by Big Freedia: “The coined term and phrase ‘release a/yo wiggle’ has now become closely synonymous with Big Freedia, thereby contributing to Big Freedia’s fame. However, Big Fredia did not compose or write the phrase, and Big Freedia never credited Da Showstoppaz as the source.”
According to the lawsuit, Da Showstoppaz first learned about Big Freedia’s song when they heard “Break My Soul.” They say they notified Beyoncé and others of the alleged infringement infringement last month, but that she has refused to take a license.
Reps for Beyoncé and Sony Music did not immediately return a request for comment on the allegations.
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Diddy, real name Sean Combs, is already scrambling from a personal image standpoint based on the leak of the video showing Combs violently assaulting his ex-girlfriend, Cassie Ventura. Amid the chatter surrounding those images, another accuser has filed a lawsuit alleging that Diddy sexually assaulted her in 2003.
As reported by CNN, Crystal McKinney, a winner of MTV’s Model Mission series, was 22 at the time she met Diddy during a Men’s Fashion Week dinner in 2003. McKinney wrote in her complaint that Combs invited her to his nearby recording studio where she claims he allegedly drugged her with marijuana laced with a stronger narcotic.
The details of McKinney’s accounts of the events might be disturbing to some so we urge caution from this point forward. McKinney added that she was already under the influence of alcohol when she was handed the marijuana joint and says she was then led to a bathroom by Combs and forced to perform oral sex on him.
McKinney says she lost consciousness while at the studio and woke up in a cab heading to the home of a designer she was working with at the time and realized that she was sexually assaulted.
Bad Boy Records, Sean John Clothing LLC, and Universal Music Group Inc. are all named as defendants in McKinney’s lawsuit and according to CNN, none of them made any public inference to the filing. The lawsuit was filed over violations noted in the New York Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law. It is the sixth such lawsuit, all of which make mention of sexual assault
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Sean “Diddy” Combs has been accused of sexual assault in a new lawsuit filed by a woman who claims the hip-hop mogul sexually assaulted her in a recording studio bathroom in 2003.
According to the complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court in New York by attorneys Michelle Caiola and Jonathan Goldhirsch, Crystal McKinney claims she met Combs at a Men’s Fashion Week dinner in Manhattan on the invite of a fashion designer she knew. While attending the dinner, during which she alleges that Combs came onto her “in a sexually suggestive manner,” she says he invited her to hang out at his recording studio.
After arriving at the studio, where McKinney says several other men were present, she claims she was given alcohol and a marijuana joint that she later came to believe was laced “with a narcotic or other intoxicating substance.” She says Combs then led her to a bathroom, where he began kissing her without her consent before shoving her head in his crotch and forcing her to perform oral sex over her protests.
McKinney, who was then working as a professional model, claims that she later “awakened in shock” to find herself in a taxi heading back to the apartment of the designer who had invited her to the dinner. At this point, she “realized that she had been sexually assaulted by Combs,” the complaint reads. The lawsuit adds that following the alleged assault, McKinney’s “modeling opportunities quickly began to dwindle and then evaporated entirely” after Combs allegedly “blackballed” her in the industry. After falling into “a tailspin of anxiety and depression,” she claims she attempted suicide in 2004 and later fell into drug and alcohol addiction to cope with the trauma of the alleged assault.
The new lawsuit was filed under the NYC Gender Motivated Violence Act, which created a two-year lookback window beginning in March 2023 that allows survivors of gender-motivated violence to sue their abusers for alleged incidents that occurred outside the statute of limitations.
Also named as defendants in the lawsuit are Combs’ label Bad Boy Records, its parent company Universal Music Group and Combs’ clothing company Sean John Clothing, all of which McKinney claims “enabled” the alleged assault by “actively maintaining and employing Combs in a position of power” despite the fact that they allegedly “knew or should have known that Combs posed a risk of sexual assault.”
McKinney is asking for damages for mental and emotional injury, distress, pain and suffering and injury to her reputation as well as punitive damages, among other relief.
Representatives for Combs, Bad Boy Entertainment, Sean John Clothing and Universal Music Group did not immediately respond to Billboard‘s requests for comment.
Tuesday’s complaint marks the sixth sexual misconduct lawsuit to have been filed against Combs over the past several months. The torrent of lawsuits was kicked off by a November 2023 complaint filed by his former girlfriend Cassie Ventura, who alleged repeated abuse by the mogul over the course of more than a decade.
Though Ventura’s lawsuit was settled just one day later, a 2016 security video published by CNN on Friday (May 17) showed Combs physically assaulting Ventura in a hotel hallway. Though Combs denied all of Ventura’s initial allegations, in the wake of the video’s release he issued an apology calling his behavior in the clip “inexcusable.” L.A. District Attorney George Gascón later released a statement saying that Combs could not be prosecuted over the assault due to the statute of limitations.
Combs has strongly denied all allegations of sexual assault made against him. On Dec. 6, he released a statement that read: “Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.”
In November, Combs stepped down as chairman of his digital media company Revolt before reportedly selling his stake in the company in March. Also in March, federal agents conducted raids of Combs’ L.A. and Miami homes “in connection” with a federal sex trafficking investigation, according to CNN.
Podcast and music streaming company LiveOne is being sued for allegedly “openly and illegally operating a commercial office, business event center, professional podcast interview studio, and music recording studio” out of a 6,000-square-foot mansion in Beverly Hills, according to a complaint filed May 10 by the property’s next-door neighbors.
Entertainment attorney Michael Kibler and his wife Ann Kibler allege LiveOne has been a “nuisance” since it moved to take over the lease for the house in 2022, leading to “noise at all hours of the day and night, increased foot and car traffic associated with commercial operations, and parking overflow, from the day-to-day commercial activity at the residence,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed by Kibler’s law partner John Fowler.
The house is located in the famed Beverly Hills Flats neighborhood, which has long struggled to balance the privacy and safety needs of its wealthy residents with the hustle and bustle of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills’ glitzy Golden Triangle corridor.
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According to the complaint, the Beverly Hills home now being used by LiveOne had been privately held and occupied by a long-time owner who passed away in 2021. The property, which includes, a pool, a swimming lap lane and a guest house, was then purchased by Siamak Khakshooy and Tanaz Koshki for $6.9 million in October 2021 and rented the following December to The Revels Group, which manages artists including rapper G-Eazy.
That’s when the problems for the Kibler family began, according to the lawsuit. The Revels Group used the space as its “creative compound,” the lawsuit reads, operating music studios on the property and promoting “all-night music industry events hosted by professional DJs” on a “nightclub-quality sound system in the backyard.” After receiving multiple complaints about the house, Beverly Hills’ Code Enforcement department launched an investigation in September 2022 and ordered the company to “permanently terminate all operations,” which led to The Revels Group not renewing its lease. After The Revels Group moved out in December 2022, LiveOne moved in around March 2023.
Since taking over the property, LiveOne “has operated its music and entertainment company by engaging in recording studio activities, hosting a pre-Grammy night party on February 3, 2024, and holding other music entertainment events,” the lawsuit reads.
The Kiblers have hired private investigators to surveil the house and issue lengthy reports identifying LiveOne staffers as they enter and exit the property, even running license plate checks on cars parked near the house to determine the identities of the drivers, according to the lawsuit. Besides the occasional late-night party, the Kibler’s biggest complaint is the “large quantities of trash overflowing from the City trash and recycling bins in the alley behind The LiveOne House.”
The Kiblers are suing LiveOne and the property’s owners for violating local zoning laws, charging both with public and private nuisance, as well as infliction of emotional distress. The Kiblers are asking a judge to order LiveOne to cease all business at the house and pay a $10,000 fine for each day it operates at the house.
Billboard reached out to LiveOne for comment but did not receive a response.