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An Atlanta judge on Friday once again refused to release Young Thug from jail while he awaits trial in a sweeping RICO case against alleged gang members, denying him bond for a fourth time over fears of witness intimidation.
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At a hearing in Fulton County Superior Court, Judge Ural Glanville cited claims by prosecutors that “recent conversations” with witnesses in the case suggested that the superstar rapper (real name Jeffery Williams) was “asking for permission to harm others.”
“The court finds that would pose a significant risk to the community,” Judge Glanville said. “For that reason I’m going to continue to deny bond at this time. That’s my ruling.”
Earlier in the hearing, Thug’s attorney Brian Steel had argued that his client posed no such risk, and that the rapper’s pre-trial incarceration – for 14 months and counting – were causing serious harm to his health, including exacerbating a kidney condition with poor nutrition. At one point, he likened Thug’s stay in jail to a form of “torture.”
Among other alleged evidence, prosecutors claimed that a person close to Thug told police the rapper had messaged her “Snitch hoes get murked. Them and their kids.” Thug’s lawyers strongly disputed the existence of that text, and prosecutors later clarified that it had been sent in 2010.
In his closing plea to Judge Glanville, Steel sharply criticized the claims made by prosecutors to keep the rapper behind bars.
“Your honor, you are being given information that is not appropriate,” Steel said. “I would not come before the court, for a third time. Mr. Williams can have a bond with whatever conditions the court needs. It will just be the right thing to do under law.”
But Judge Glanville was unswayed, saying the claim of potential witness intimidation “still troubles the court.”
Such denials of bond are a loss for any criminal defendant, but they have loomed particularly large in the YSL case in recent months, as the start of the actual trial has repeatedly been delayed.
The trial technically started in January, but after six months of attempting to pick a jury that will decide the case, not one single juror has yet to be chosen as of Friday. The delay has largely been driven by the fact that the massive case, dealing with years of allegations and many separate defendants, is expected to run well into next year. Many prospective jurors have successfully argued that they cannot afford to halt their lives for that long, citing jobs, childcare commitments and health problems.
Young Thug was indicted in May 2022, along with dozens of others, on accusations that his YSL was not really a record label called “Young Stoner Life,” but a violent Atlanta street gang called “Young Slime Life.” Prosecutors claim members of YSL committed murders, carjackings, armed robberies, drug dealing and other crimes over the course of a decade.
The case is built around Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a law based on the more famous federal RICO statute that’s been used to target the mafia, drug cartels and other forms of organized crime. Such laws make it easier for prosecutors to sweep up many members of an alleged criminal conspiracy based on many smaller acts that aren’t directly related.
The rapper Gunna was also charged in the original indictment, but he agreed in December to plead guilty to the single charge he was facing. At the time, Gunna said he was not cooperating with prosecutors, but he acknowledged in court that YSL was both “a music label and a gang.”
Thug, who continues to strongly deny the charges he’s facing, has repeatedly sought to be released on bond ahead of trial. But such release has been repeatedly denied, largely because prosecutors have warned the judge that he might threaten witnesses or otherwise obstruct the case.
In April, Thug’s attorney again demanded that his client be released from jail. Steel argued that his client was “innocent of all charges” and that he should not be left “languishing in county jail” while the case continued to drag on.
“Conditions can be set to ensure that Mr. Williams comes back to court when required to do so, and due to the extended nature of this trial, Mr. Williams respectfully requests this Honorable Court reconsider its position on bond,” Steel wrote at the time.
In June, Dylan Bourne, who manages JELEEL! and Dwellers, opened Instagram to find his inbox flooded with messages. Earlier that day, he had posted an exasperated friend’s observation about the habits of some music industry attorneys: “Seems like the standard with all these lawyers is [to] sign a million things you can’t possibly time manage.” Many of Bourne’s followers were quietly harboring the same frustration, and they started sending him their own stories of long delays and extended silences.
“I just had this feeling that if both myself and another respected peer were both experiencing these same difficulties, we couldn’t be alone, and I was curious to hear other people’s perspectives on the matter,” Bourne tells Billboard. “I could have never imagined the volume of responses that came in from fellow managers, artists, producers, and even lawyers.”
While attorneys operate almost entirely behind the scenes in the music industry, they wield a significant amount of power. Artists require a lawyer before they can sign a record deal, and “the lawyer controls that conversation in most cases,” explains one senior label executive. As a result, “Lawyers are the center of A&R.”
With great power comes great responsibility. But “there is no scrutiny on lawyers,” says one artist manager who requested anonymity to speak freely. “There’s no way to hold them accountable other than firing them.”
Jason Berger, a partner at Lewis Brisbois, was among those who reached out to Bourne after the post. “He’s right,” Berger says. “Some lawyers abuse that position because of the money that can be made when you’re in such a unique space.”
“This is a problem with lawyers that I’ve observed since I started practicing,” adds Gandhar Savur, founder of Savur Law. “I sometimes don’t get a response from an opposing lawyer for months, and these lawyers somehow flourish professionally while routinely not responding to people or getting transactions closed. It’s something that reflects poorly on our profession as a whole.”
Other attorneys bristled at the critique. “Often, lawyers will be blamed for the shortcomings of incompetent managers,” one attorney says. “Even some managers that are very prominent in the business have no idea what they’re doing” — and they bog down lawyers with requests that should be handled by an accountant or a label, the attorney continues, preventing them from focusing on their actual jobs.
“Lawyers aren’t just like, ‘We’re gonna cash these checks and screw our clients because we don’t care,’” adds Zach Bohlender, a former music attorney who left the profession to co-found Charta, a company that aims to save lawyers time by distilling the process of drawing up side-artist and producer agreements. “We feel that stress. It’s really tough mentally.”
The simmering tension between music-industry factions is partially a symptom of a shift in the broader ecosystem. “The blame shouldn’t all fall on [lawyers’] shoulders,” Bourne acknowledges. “Every role has been affected by the oversaturation our market is experiencing.”
Executives on both sides of the debate agree that there are more artists than ever before, and today’s music lawyers have more to do than their predecessors. “The workload of an artist attorney has definitely increased as music-making has become more collaborative,” says Adam Zia, founding partner of the Zia Firm. “There used to be a few producers for every album; now there might be 20 or 30 different writers and producers.” And a contract has to be drawn up and negotiated for each one of those collaborators.
“When we started going to five agreements per song, we should have taken them down from 35 pages to three pages,” says Josh Pothier, director of Kingsway Music Library, a collection of original compositions created by the producer Ging (formerly known as Frank Dukes) for sampling purposes.
“You look through those agreements, and there are still B-side protections that haven’t been necessary since we were pressing 7-inch singles,” Pothier continues. “We had a real opportunity to restructure this business when it went digital. We didn’t take it, and now we’re really struggling.”
Not only does each contemporary release tend to come laden with more paperwork, there are also simply more releases than there used to be. “Now artists are terrified that if they don’t put out music constantly, people are just going to forget them,” Bohlender explains.
But many of the managers and lawyers who spoke for this story also pointed out that lawyers are “incentivized” to take on a lot of clients since most of them operate on a 5% commission for the deals they shepherd across the finish line. “We represent developing acts for basically nothing, and there’s a venture component — you represent X number of artists, and hopefully a couple end up making it and they make everything worthwhile from a financial standpoint,” says the attorney who requested anonymity. But this can frustrate managers who see their lawyers single-mindedly chasing “after big money deals and just leaving all the smaller shit to the side,” as Pothier puts it.
More artists releasing more music with more paperwork, combined with a business model that encourages volume, means that “everybody’s completely jammed,” according to Lucas Keller, founder and president of Milk & Honey. Jammed to the point where attorneys’ response time is almost a joke around the music industry.
“A guy called me the other day and said, ‘I want to sack my lawyer — he takes too long on agreements, two months sometimes,’” Keller recalls. While his friend was annoyed, the Milk & Honey boss thought two months was actually a pretty decent turnaround time relative to some of the lags he’s seen. “The guy sounds great!” he quipped. “We should send him more business!”
Lawyers are hardly the only music industry operators accused of stretching themselves thin — the major labels have been charged with doing the same thing. However, “When a label is over-signing stuff, they’re paying money for it, and the artist is making a judgment call: ‘There’s a very real possibility that I could be shelved or get lost in the sauce,’” says Matt Buser, founder of Buser Legal. In contrast, he notes, “When you sign up with an attorney, you might even be paying the attorney a retainer. The consideration flow is different.”
And unlike labels, lawyers also have certain duties to their clients, according to Stephen Gillers, who teaches ethics at New York University School of Law. Under the court’s rules of professional conduct, “you can’t take on more clients than you can competently handle,” Gillers says. (He also notes that “you cannot take on a client in a matter if the matter is adverse to another client,” another problem in the music industry.)
What can be done to both help artists who need legal counsel and ease the burden on their lawyers? “We could do a lot better at streamlining a lawyer’s job by making a global template for agreements,” Pothier says. Several managers also believe that artificial intelligence might one day take over some of the time-consuming contract-drafting duties.
Bohlender is attempting to create his own tech solution with Charta. “How do we create a more efficient way to draft contracts?” he asks. His platform aims to distill producer and side-artist agreements to a few key provisions that can be quickly negotiated and then slotted into standardized contracts.
But for now, Bohlender notes, solutions are scarce: “No one’s winning.”
A home that Las Vegas police searched this week in connection with the 1996 drive-by shooting of Tupac Shakur is tied to a man long known to investigators, whose nephew had emerged as a suspect shortly after the rapper’s killing.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department confirmed it served a search warrant Monday in the neighboring city of Henderson. But the department hasn’t released other details, including whether they expect to make an arrest for the first time in the slaying of the rapper nearly 30 years ago.
Public records, including voting records, link the property to the wife of Duane “Keffe D” Davis, a self-described “gangster” and the uncle of Orlando Anderson, one of Shakur’s known rivals who authorities have long suspected in the rapper’s death. Anderson denied involvement in Shakur’s killing at the time, and died two years later in an unrelated gang shooting in Compton, California.
A copy of the warrant obtained Thursday by The Associated Press shows detectives collected multiple computers, a cellular telephone, “documentary documents,” a Vibe magazine that featured Shakur, several .40-caliber bullets, two “tubs containing photographs” and a copy of Davis’ 2019 memoir, ”Compton Street Legend.”
Residents of a suburban small Henderson neighborhood — nestled in the foothills of the city about 20 miles southeast of the Las Vegas Strip — said they saw officers detain two people outside the home while investigators searched the one-story property.
“There were cruisers and SWAT vehicles. They had lights shining on the house,” said Don Sansouci, 61, who had just gone to bed with his wife when a swirl of blue and red police lights stirred them awake sometime after 9 p.m.
Sansouci said he watched from the sidewalk Monday night as a man and a woman stepped outside of a house surrounded by police, place their hands behind their heads and slowly walk backwards toward the officers.
The case is being presented to a grand jury in Las Vegas, according to a person with direct knowledge of the investigation who was not authorized to speak publicly. The timing and results of those proceedings was unclear, and the person did not identify the two people whom police encountered at the house.
The person confirmed that investigators seized computers, published materials and photos, along with copies of Davis’ 2019 memoir titled “Compton Street Legend.”
Sansouci said he and his wife don’t know the people who live in the home. He described the area as “a nice, quiet cul-de-sac neighborhood” where most residents keep to themselves.
It was not immediately known if Davis has a lawyer who can comment on his behalf, and messages left for Davis and his wife, Paula Clemons, weren’t returned. Records show the two were married in Clark County, Nevada, in 2005.
News of the search breathed new life into Shakur’s long-unsolved killing, which has been surrounded by conspiracy theories. There have never been any arrests, yet attention on the case has endured for decades.
Shakur’s death came as his fourth solo album, “All Eyez on Me,” remained on the charts, with some 5 million copies sold. Nominated six times for a Grammy Award, Shakur is largely considered one of the most influential and versatile rappers of all time.
On the night of Sept. 7, 1996, Shakur was riding in a black BMW driven by Death Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight in a convoy of about 10 cars. They were waiting at a red light a block from the Las Vegas Strip when a white Cadillac pulled up next to them and gunfire erupted. Shakur was shot multiple times and died days later.
The shooting unfolded shortly after a casino brawl earlier in the evening involving Anderson, Shakur and their associates.
There were many witnesses, but the investigation quickly stalled, in part because those witnesses refused to cooperate, Las Vegas police said in the past.
That silence broke, to a point, in 2018, when Davis — saying he was ready to speak publicly after a cancer diagnosis — admitted to being in the front seat of the Cadillac. In an interview for a BET show, he implicated his nephew in the shooting, saying Anderson was one of two people in the backseat.
Davis said the shots were fired from the back of the car, though he stopped short of naming the shooter, saying he had to abide by the “code of the streets.”
But in his memoir, Davis said he shared what he knew nearly a decade earlier in closed-door meetings with federal and local authorities who were investigating the possibility that Shakur’s slaying was linked to the March 1997 drive-by shooting of his rap rival, the Notorious B.I.G.
“They offered to let me go for running a “criminal enterprise” and numerous alleged murders for the truth about the Tupac and Biggie murders,” Davis said in his book. “They promised they would shred the indictment and stop the grand jury if I helped them out.”
At the time of their deaths, both rappers were involved in an infamous East Coast-West Coast rivalry that primarily defined the hip-hop scene during the mid-1990s. The feud was ignited after Shakur was seriously wounded in another shooting during a robbery in the lobby of a midtown Manhattan hotel.
Shakur openly accused B.I.G. and Sean “Diddy” Combs of having prior knowledge of the shooting, which both vehemently denied. It sparked a serious divide within the hip-hop community and fans.
Davis wrote that he “went ahead and started answering their questions about the events leading up to Tupac getting shot.”
“I sang because they promised I would not be prosecuted,” he said, adding that he thought they were lying about the deal. “But they kept their word and stopped the indictment, tore up the whole case. Nobody went to jail.”
It’s unclear if Davis has been living in the home Las Vegas police searched this week and whether he was present when officers descended on the property. Las Vegas court records show there has been an active warrant out for his arrest since July 2022, when he failed to appear in court on a drug charge.
With Taylor Swift hiring one of her longtime lawyers as the new general counsel for her 13 Management, Billboard dug into the many cases he’s handled for the superstar – including a bizarre trademark battle with an “Evermore” theme park and Taylor’s high-profile assault accusations against a radio DJ.
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As reported Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal, Swift’s company is set to hire Douglas Baldridge, a veteran litigator at the major Washington, D.C.-based law firm law firm Venable, as the new top attorney for her company in the fall. He’s replacing Jay Schaudies, who the Journal says is retiring.
Though he’s technically a new hire at 13 Management, Baldridge and Swift are hardly strangers. From his position as outside counsel at Venable, Baldridge has repped Swift and her company for years in a number of major lawsuits.
His work for the star first made headlines in 2017, when he represented her in a high-profile battle with a Denver radio DJ named David Mueller, who Swift claimed had groped her at photoshoot. Mueller sued Swift for defamation, claiming her accusations were false and had cost him his job. Taylor quickly countersued, accusing Mueller of civil assault and battery over the incident.
At a jury trial in August 2017, Baldridge was direct with jurors in his closing statement: “The guy did it. Don’t be fooled. Don’t be snookered.” After just four hours of deliberations, the jury agreed – rejecting Mueller’s allegations and holding him liable for assault and battery. After the verdict was read, Taylor blinked back tears and mouthed “thank you” to Baldridge and her other attorneys.
His work for Swift dates back even further, though. In 2014, Baldridge and other Venable lawyers defended the star in a lawsuit filed against her by a small apparel company called Lucky 13, which accused Swift of infringing its trademarks by selling T-shirts featuring that same phrase. After an extended battle over whether the star would be forced to sit for a deposition, the case ended in a settlement the next year.
One of Baldridge’s biggest recent wins for Taylor came in 2021, when a Utah fantasy theme park called Evermore sued her for trademark infringement, claiming her smash-hit acoustic album was threatening to “crowd out” its own brand name.
But Swift’s lawyers quickly flipped the script. They filed a countersuit claiming it was the theme park that was in the wrong, for allegedly neglecting to pay royalties for playing Taylor’s songs for their customers – not just over loud speakers, but with live performances by the theme park’s character performers. They argued the park had even sought out retroactive licenses to cover up its wrongdoing.
“Defendants are making a thinly-veiled attempt to fabricate a record to justify and retroactively authorize their intentional infringement that has gone unabated since Evermore Park opened in 2018,” Baldridge wrote in that complaint. “However, a cover-up attempt now does not and cannot erase years of willful and knowing infringement.”
A month later, the park dropped its case with no money changing hands.
Baldridge also represented Swift in the epic copyright case over the lyrics to “Shake It Off,” but as part of a larger defense that also heavily featured veteran music copyright litigator Peter Anderson of the firm Davis Wright Tremaine. That case ended in a settlement in December.
As he gears up to step into the general counsel role, Baldridge is currently defending the star from another copyright lawsuit, this one filed over a companion book for her album Lover. In that case, a woman named Teresa La Dart claims Taylor stole key elements of the book’s design from her own self-published book of poetry.
In a February response to those allegations, Baldridge didn’t hold back – arguing that the case should be dismissed immediately because it failed in every way possible: “This is a lawsuit that never should have been filed, as it is legally and factually baseless.”
LONDON — When the European Union announced plans to regulate artificial intelligence in 2021, legislators started focusing on “high risk” systems that could threaten human rights, such as biometric surveillance and predictive policing. Amid increasing concern among artists and rights holders about the potential impact of AI on the creative sector, however, EU legislators are also now looking at the intersection of this new technology and copyright.
The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act, which is now being negotiated among politicians in different branches of government, is the first comprehensive legislation in the world to regulate AI. In addition to banning “intrusive and discriminatory uses” of the technology, the current version of the legislation addresses generative AI, mandating that companies disclose content that is created by AI to differentiate it from works authored by humans. Other provisions in the law would require companies that use generative AI to provide details of copyrighted works, including music, on which they trained their systems. (The AI Act is a regulation, so it would pass directly into law in all 27 member states.)
Music executives began paying closer attention to the legislation after the November launch of ChatGPT. In April, around the time that “Heart on My Sleeve,” a track that featured AI-powered imitations of vocals by Drake and The Weeknd, drove home the issue posed by AI, industry lobbyists convinced lawmakers to add the transparency provisions.
So far, big technology companies, including Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft, have publicly stated that they, too, support AI regulation, at least in the abstract. Behind the scenes, however, multiple music executives tell Billboard that technology lobbyists are trying to weaken these transparency provisions by arguing that such obligations could put European AI developers at a competitive disadvantage.
“They want codes of conduct” — as opposed to laws — “and very low forms of regulation,” says John Phelan, director general of international music publishing trade association ICMP.
Another argument is that summarizing training data “would basically come down to providing a summary of half, or even the entire, internet,” says Boniface de Champris, Brussels-based policy manager at the Computer and Communications Industry Association Europe, which counts Alphabet, Apple, Amazon and Meta among its members. “Europe’s existing copyright rules already cover AI applications sufficiently.”
In May, Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, emerged as the highest-profile critic of the EU’s proposals, accusing it of “overregulating” the nascent business. He even said that his company, which is backed by Microsoft, might consider leaving Europe if it could not comply with the legislation, although he walked back this statement a few days later. OpenAI and other companies lobbied — successfully — to have an early draft of the legislation changed so that “general-purpose AI systems” like ChatGPT would no longer be considered high risk and thus subject to stricter rules, according to documents Time magazine obtained from the European Commission. (OpenAI didn’t respond to Billboard’s requests for comment.)
The lobbying over AI echoes some of the other political conflicts between media and technology companies — especially the one over the EU Copyright Directive, which passed in 2019. While that “was framed as YouTube versus the music industry, the narrative has now switched to AI,” says Sophie Goossens, a partner at global law firm Reed Smith. “But the argument from rights holders is much the same: They want to stop tech companies from making a living on the backs of their content.”
Several of the provisions in the Copyright Directive deal with AI, including an exception in the law for text- and data-mining of copyrighted content, such as music, in certain cases. Another exception allows scientific and research institutions to engage in text- and data-mining on works to which they have lawful access.
So far, the debate around generative AI in the United States has focused on whether performers can use state laws on right of publicity to protect their distinctive voices and images — the so-called “output side” of generative AI. In contrast, both the Copyright Directive and the AI Act address the “input side,” meaning ways that rights holders can either stop AI systems from using their content for training purposes or limit which ones can in order to license that right.
Another source of tension created by the Copyright Directive is the potential for blurred boundaries between research institutions and commercial businesses. Microsoft, for example, refers to its Muzic venture as “a research project on AI music,” while Google regularly partners with independent research, academic and scientific bodies on technology developments, including AI. To close potential loopholes, Phelan wants lawmakers to strengthen the bill’s transparency provisions, requiring specific details of all music accessed for training, instead of the “summary” that’s currently called for. IFPI, the global recorded-music trade organization, regards the transparency provisions as “a meaningful step in the right direction,” according to Lodovico Benvenuti, managing director of its European office, and he says he hopes lawmakers won’t water that down.
The effects of the AI Act will be felt far outside Europe, partly because they will apply to any company that does business in the 27-country bloc and partly because it will be the first comprehensive set of rules on the use of the technology. In the United States, the Biden administration has met with technology executives to discuss AI but has yet to lay out a legislation strategy. On June 22, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that he was working on “exceedingly ambitious” bipartisan legislation on the topic, but political divides in the United States as the next presidential election approaches would make passage difficult. China unveiled its own draft laws in April, although other governments may be reluctant to look at legislation there as a model.
“The rest of the world is looking at the EU because they are leading the way in terms of how to regulate AI,” says Goossens. “This will be a benchmark.”
Marilyn Manson will plead no contest to blowing his nose on a videographer at a 2019 concert in New Hampshire, according to a filing by his attorney.
The rocker, whose legal name is Brian Warner, was charged with two misdemeanor counts of simple assault stemming from the encounter at the Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion in Gilford on Aug. 19, 2019.
A notice of intent filed Monday (July 17) says that Manson is expected to plead no contest to only one charge, and that prosecutors would dismiss the other in the fully negotiated plea. A no contest plea means Manson will not contest the charge and does not admit guilt.
Manson would face a sentence of a $1,200 fine with part of it suspended and 20 hours of community service within six months. Manson also would need to remain arrest-free and notify local police of any New Hampshire performances for two years.
A judge would have to accept the plea, which is expected to be entered Thursday (July 20) in Belknap County Superior Court. That’s in place of a final pretrial hearing that was scheduled in advance of his planned Aug. 7 trial.
It’s not clear whether Manson would be required to be in court or be allowed to participate via video. His lawyer, Kent Barker, said Tuesday it would be up to the judge.
According to a police affidavit, Manson approached videographer Susan Fountain in the venue’s stage pit area, put his face close to her camera and spit a “big lougee” at her. She was struck on both hands with saliva. He also is accused approaching her a second time, blowing his nose on her arm and hands.
Prosecutors planned to dismiss the charge stemming from the first encounter, according to the notice. Manson initially pleaded not guilty in 2021. His lawyer had said at the time that the type of filming Fountain was doing commonly exposes videographers to “incidental contact” with bodily fluids.
“The defendant’s performance for the past twenty years are well known to include shocking and evocative antics similar to those that occurred here,” Barker wrote. “The alleged victim consented to exposing herself to potential contact with sweat, saliva and phlegm in close quarters.”
Barker also had said Manson planned to argue that any contact related to spitting or sneezing was unintentional. If Manson had gone to trial on the charges, each could have resulted in a jail sentence of less than a year and a $2,000 fine if convicted. Manson also has faced abuse accusations unrelated to the New Hampshire allegation in recent years. He has denied wrongdoing.
In May, a California judge threw out key sections of Manson’s lawsuit against his former fiancee, Westworld actor Evan Rachel Wood, claiming she fabricated public allegations that he sexually and physically abused her during their relationship and encouraged other women to do the same.
Manson’s suit, filed last year, alleges that Wood and another woman named as a defendant, Illma Gore, defamed Manson, intentionally caused him emotional distress and derailed his career in music, TV and film. Several women have sued Manson in recent years with allegations of sexual and other abuse. Most have been dismissed or settled, including a suit filed by Game of Thrones actor Esme Bianco.
The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly.
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Authorities in Nevada confirmed Tuesday (July 18) that they served a search warrant this week in connection with the long-unsolved killing of rapper Tupac Shakur nearly 30 years ago.
Shakur, one of the most prolific figures in hip-hop, was killed on the night of Sept. 7, 1996, in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. He was 25.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said the search warrant was executed Monday in the nearby city of Henderson.
Department spokesperson Aden OcampoGomez said he could not provide further details on the latest development in the case, including whether it was served at a home or a business, citing the open investigation.
Nevada does not have a statute of limitations for prosecuting homicide cases.
Tupac was gunned down inside a black vehicle stopped at a red light near the Las Vegas Strip. Shot multiple times, the rapper was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he died a week later.
Largely considered one of the most influential and versatile rappers of all time, the six-time Grammy-nominated Shakur has had five No. 1 albums: 1995’s Me Against the World, 1996’s All Eyez on Me and three posthumous releases: 1996’s The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, which was recorded under the name Makaveli, as well as 2001’s Until the End of Time and 2004’s Loyal to the Game.
In 2017, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by Snoop Dogg. In June of this year, the rapper received a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
His professional music career only lasted five years, but Tupac secured 21 Billboard Hot 100 hits, including two top 10s: “Dear Mama/Old School” in 1995 and his best-known track, 1996’s “How Do U Want It/California Love,” featuring K-Ci and JoJo. The latter spent two weeks at the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 from his final studio album and Death Row Records debut, All Eyez on Me.
According to Luminate, Tupac has sold 33 million albums (41 million when including track sale and streaming equivalents). The rapper’s on-demand video and audio streams total 10.1 billion.
He’s also had some museum exhibits that paid homage to his life including “Tupac Shakur. Wake Me When I’m Free,” which opened in 2021.
LONDON (AP) — Kevin Spacey’s lawyers enlisted the help of an A-list star Monday in his sexual assault trial, calling on Elton John and his husband David Furnish to cast doubt on one of the Oscar winner’s accusers at the end of the defense case. John appeared briefly in the London court by video link […]
Jimmie Allen is fighting back against a pair of lawsuits filed this spring that accused the country star of sexual assault, denying all the allegations and countersuing both women — claiming that one of them defamed him and that the other illegally swiped his cellphone.
In documents filed Thursday (July 13) in Nashville federal court, Allen, 38, lodged his first formal responses to the two abuse lawsuits, which have seen the once-rising country star dropped from his label and removed from festival lineups. The first case claims he repeatedly assaulted an unnamed “Jane Doe” on his management team; the second claims he assaulted another woman in a Las Vegas hotel room and secretly recorded it.
Allen’s lawyers went beyond simply denying those allegations in Thursday’s filings, bringing a countersuit against each accuser and seeking unspecified monetary damages. In the case of Allen’s former day-to-day manager, the attorneys claim that she defamed him by making “deliberate, intentional, malicious, and willful” statements to Variety beyond what is included in the lawsuit. Variety broke the news of her lawsuit in early May.
“Throughout the Variety article, Jane Doe made several untruthful statements which painted Allen and Doe’s consensual affair as nonconsensual sexual misconduct,” his lawyers claim. “Allen’s reputation and relationships within the entertainment industry have also been severely damaged as a result Jane Doe’s statements in the Variety article.”
(Variety, which is owned by the same parent company as Billboard, is not named as a defendant or accused of any wrongdoing.)
In responding to the second lawsuit, in which the woman claims that Allen surreptitiously filmed their sexual encounter, his lawyers say that she had explicitly consented to the recording — and that she then unfairly took his phone with her when she left the hotel. In technical terms, they accuse her of “conversion,” a civil tort similar to theft that involves someone taking property that doesn’t belong to them.
“By taking his camera phone without permission, Jane Doe 2 wrongfully exerted a distinct act of dominion over Allen’s personal property,” his lawyers write.
The attorney representing both of Allen’s Jane Doe accusers, Elizabeth Fegan of the law firm Fegan Scott, did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday morning.
In a statement, Allen tells Billboard that he has “engaged with a legal team to proceed with an appropriate course of action,” saying he has done so in order to “protect my reputation and refute these claims that have caused severe damage to my family, mental health, and business.”
“As the son and brother of rape victims, and the father of daughters, these false claims are extremely hurtful to me and everyone around me,” Allen said. “These false allegations have caused me to lose a vast number of business and endorsement opportunities that I worked extremely hard for. These false allegations have also not only harmed me, but have caused severe financial damage to my band, my team, and their families.”
A Rapid Fall
In the wake of the two lawsuits, Allen’s once-flourishing career has cratered.
After signing with BMG’s Stony Creek/BBR imprint in 2017, Allen’s first two singles, “Best Shot” and “Make Me Want To,” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart, while he scored a third No. 1 in 2021 with “Freedom Was a Highway” (with Brad Paisley). “Down Home,” the first single from his 2022 album, Tulip Drive, reached No. 2. He also performed for Garth Brooks at the superstar’s Kennedy Center Honors induction in 2021, and with Elton John on the legend’s 2021 album The Lockdown Sessions.
But following the accusations, his label, booking agency (UTA), former publicist (Full Coverage Communications) and management company (The Familie) have all suspended or dropped him. His live appearances have also dried up, including a June 11 performance during CMA Fest and several other summer festival gigs.
In addition to the career fallout, Allen has also separated from his wife, Alexis Gale, who is pregnant with their third child. The couple announced the news on social media, just weeks before the first lawsuit was filed and the accusations were made public.
That first case, filed on May 11, alleged that Allen had “manipulated and used his power” over the plaintiff, who was employed by his then-management company Wide Open Management, in order to “sexually harass and abuse her” over a period of 18 months from 2020 to 2022.
“Plaintiff expressed in words and actions that Jimmie Allen’s conduct was unwelcome, including pushing him away, sitting where he could not reach her, telling him she was uncomfortable and no, and crying uncontrollably,” the woman’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. “However, Allen made clear that plaintiff’s job was dependent on her staying silent about his conduct.”
Allen Responds
In Thursday’s response to those claims, Allen tells a different story — one of “a consensual sexual relationship” in which encounters were “initiated by both Allen and Doe,” an affair that he says he ended in the fall of 2022 to “focus on repairing his relationship with his wife.” He says the first time he heard any claim about “improper conduct” was in November 2022, when he was contacted by her attorney.
In counter-suing for defamation, Allen’s lawyers focus on Doe’s statements made to Variety rather than the actual claims in her lawsuit — likely because it’s harder to bring such claims over statements made as part of a judicial proceeding. The article, Allen says, contained “several pieces of information that were not included in her complaint,” as well as statements that “disparaged” him, including calling him a “threat.”
“The statements … caused great damage to Allen, including impairment of his reputation and standing in the community, personal humiliation, and mental anguish and suffering,” his lawyers write. In technical terms, they also accuse Doe of invasion of privacy, inflicting emotional distress, and interference with business relations.
The second case against Allen, filed on June 9, was brought by a woman identified as Jane Doe 2, who accused him of battery, assault and other wrongdoing over a July 2022 incident at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. Though she had “willingly joined Allen in the bedroom,” she claimed she had “repeatedly told him she did not want him to ejaculate inside her” because she was not on birth control, but that Allen had done so anyway.
The June lawsuit also claimed that, after the sexual encounter, Doe 2 discovered a cell phone in a closet of the hotel room, “focused on the bed, recording the scene.” She alleged that she had “not consented to being recorded” and that, after failing to convince Allen to allow her to unlock the phone to delete the recordings, she had taken it with her and later passed it along to the Las Vegas Police Department.
In his response to that lawsuit on Thursday, Allen admits to having “unprotected sex” with Doe, but claims that he “did not ejaculate during the encounter.” He also acknowledged recording the incident but, crucially, alleges that he secured her explicit permission to do so while the pair kissed on a hotel balcony.
“Before the encounter escalated further, Allen asked Jane Doe 2 if it was OK for him to set up his camera phone to record their encounter. Jane Doe 2 agreed,” Allen’s lawyers wrote of the incident. “Allen left the balcony and set up his camera phone in plain view at the foot of the bed. Allen and Jane Doe 2 began to engage in a consensual sexual encounter in view of the camera phone.”
When he awoke to find that Doe 2 had “left the hotel room with his camera phone,” Allen claims that he texted her, to which she allegedly responded that she “did not approve of him recording their encounter.” When she “demanded the passcode to Allen’s camera phone” so that she could further delete the recording, he says he declined to offer it because the phone “contained several pieces of confidential personal and business information.” He says he offered to “delete the video to her satisfaction” if she returned the phone, but that she did not do so.
“Allen still does not have possession of the camera phone,” his lawyers write.
(When the second case was filed in June, a spokesperson for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department [LVMPD] confirmed to Billboard that “a report was completed” over the incident, but did not provide any additional information. A request for any public records linked to the report was unsuccessful.)
Former Manager Wants Out
Allen wasn’t the only defendant to file his response to the abuse lawsuits this week. On Tuesday, his former management company Wide Open Music filed a motion seeking to be dismissed from the first case, which claimed the company did not do enough to protect Allen’s day-to-day manager from his abusive behavior and had then fired her when she complained about it.
In its response, attorneys for Wide Open Music (which parted with Allen in October 2022) expressed dismay at the woman’s allegations about Allen’s conduct, but said the company itself could not be held legally responsible.
“Undoubtedly, if the actions she claims Allen took against her actually occurred, they are deplorable and clearly inappropriate,” the company’s lawyers wrote. “Despite the nature of the allegations, however, Plaintiff has not stated any plausible claims … that [Wide Open Music] should be held liable, either for its client’s misconduct or independently of it.”
Following this week’s new filings, the Jane Doe plaintiffs will file their own responses in the months ahead, both to Allen’s new accusations and to Wide Open Music’s motion to be dismissed from the case. The case will then head toward more litigation and an eventual jury trial, but it could be years before such a courtroom showdown is reached.
In his statement Thursday, Allen seemed intent on getting to such a trial: “As the legal process runs its course, I look forward to the opportunity to clear my name.”
Stories about sexual assault allegations can be traumatizing for survivors of sexual assault. If you or anyone you know needs support, you can reach out to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN). The organization provides free, confidential support to sexual assault victims. Call RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE) or visit the anti-sexual violence organization’s website for more information.
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