Drake Sues Universal Music Over Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’

Music|Drake Sues His Label, Calling Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’ Defamatory

During a venomous back-and-forth barrage of diss tracks last year, the rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar accused one another of phoniness, hypocrisy and abuse. But while fans anointed Lamar’s chart-topping single “Not Like Us” the battle’s knockout blow, Drake saw the song’s punchlines invoking pedophilia as something far more insidious — and with real-world consequences.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court, the artist born Aubrey Drake Graham sued Universal Music Group, the record company behind both rappers, for defamation and harassment, calling its release and promotion of “Not Like Us” an example of valuing “corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists.”

The suit, brought in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses Universal of having “approved, published, and launched a campaign to create a viral hit out of a rap track” that was “intended to convey the specific, unmistakable, and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal pedophile, and to suggest that the public should resort to vigilante justice in response.”

Noting that the cover art for “Not Like Us” features a photo of Drake’s Toronto home dotted with markers meant to represent the presence of registered sex offenders, the complaint invokes a shooting at the residence days after the song’s release that injured a security guard — calling it “the 2024 equivalent of ‘Pizzagate’” — and cites two other attempted trespassers in the days that followed.

The suit was brought on behalf of Drake by Michael J. Gottlieb, a partner at the firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, who has previously represented the owner of the Washington pizzeria targeted by the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorists and the election workers falsely accused by Rudolph W. Giuliani of aiding a false plot to steal the 2020 presidential election.