A federal judge says Nelly should be reimbursed for hefty legal bills he spent defeating a “baseless” and “frivolous” lawsuit filed by one of his former St. Lunatics bandmates.
The case claimed that Nelly owed ex-bandmate Ali a cut of royalties from the rapper’s debut album Country Grammar. But the action was dropped earlier this year after Nelly’s attorneys argued it was obviously filed years after the statute of limitations had expired.
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On Friday (Oct. 10), U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert W. Lehrburger wrote that the lawyers who filed the case should be punished for doing so, saying they had pursued the case against Nelly long after it was clear that they had no grounds to sue.
“It should have been patently obvious to [Ali]’s attorneys that his copyright ownership claim was time-barred,” the judge wrote. “After being placed on notice that the [case] stood no chance of success, [Ali] did not withdraw his complaint. Instead, his attorneys doubled down.”
Nelly (Cornell Haynes) rose to fame in the 1990s as a member of St. Lunatics, a hip-hop group also composed of St. Louis high school friends Ali (Ali Jones), Murphy Lee (Tohri Harper), Kyjuan (Robert Kyjuan) and City Spud (Lavell Webb). With the June 2000 release of Country Grammar — which spent five weeks atop the Billboard 200 — Nelly broke away from the group and started a solo career that later reached superstar heights with his 2002 chart-topping singles “Hot in Herre” and “Dilemma.”
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Filed last year, the lawsuit alleged that Nelly had cut his former crew members out of the credits and royalty payments for the hit album. It claimed the star had repeatedly “manipulated” them into falsely thinking they’d be paid for their work.
But three of the St. Lunatics quickly dropped out, saying they had never actually wanted to sue Nelly and had never given legal authorization to the lawyers who filed the case. Though Ali initially moved ahead alone, he dropped the case entirely in April without explanation.
Though the case was over, Nelly’s attorneys refused to let Ali off that easy. They asked for sanctions — meaning legal penalties — against Ali and his attorneys over a “vexatious” lawsuit that “should never have been brought.”
“Plaintiff’s counsel succeeded in its frivolous campaign aimed at forcing Haynes to spend money defending Plaintiff’s ridiculous time-barred claims,” the star’s lawyer, Ken Freundlich, wrote at the time.
In the American legal system, each side usually pays its own legal bills, even including defendants who win a lawsuit that they feel they shouldn’t have faced. Only in rare cases, including as punishment for misconduct, do judges order the loser to repay the winner’s fees.
On Friday, Judge Lehrburger said Ali’s attorneys should face that kind of sanction, saying it should have been clear to Ali’s lawyers from the outset that the case was not viable: “Jones’s copyright ownership claim was groundless on its face from the time it was first asserted,” the judge wrote.
The judge heaped most of the blame on Precious Felder Gates, Ali’s lead counsel, who he said “was the driving force behind the action” and had caused Nelly to needlessly incur expenses to defend it.”
Judge Lehrburger pointed out that after it was made clear to Gates that her case was doomed, she filed an updated version that tried to hide that fact. The judge said Gates had “manipulated the pleadings” by removing key details about when Nelly had rejected Ali’s claim — the key facts that would indicate the case was too old.
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Felder, the judge said, should face punishment for “vexatiously protracting the proceedings in bad faith by her attempt to obfuscate the facts she knew barred Jones’s claims and her subsequent refusal to withdraw the amended complaint in the face of overwhelming arguments that the claims could not possibly succeed.”
The actual sum that Felder will pay is unclear. The judge did not set an exact figure and said she only had to cover Nelly’s legal bills from after she re-filed her updated case. The sanctions must also be endorsed by a district judge, who could modify Judge Lehrburger’s findings. But with elite Los Angeles defense attorneys repping the star, the bill could easily be tens of thousands of dollars.
In a statement to Billboard, Nelly’s attorney Freundlich said: “This case sends a message to lawyers that there will be consequences for dragging a Defendant into an action that is frivolous on its face and refusing to withdraw it. There is a lane of course for zealous advocacy but when the case is time-barred according to a plaintiff’s own pleading, it has no place in the system.”
Ali’s attorney Gates did not return a request for comment by press time.
This story was updated on Oct. 10 at 5:38 p.m. ET to add a comment from Nelly’s attorney.
