A defamation lawsuit that Drake brought against Universal Music Group was tossed out Thursday by a federal judge who said the lyrics in Kendrick Lamar\u2019s dis track \u201cNot Like Us\u201d were opinion.
The feud between two of hip-hop\u2019s biggest stars erupted in the spring of 2024, with the pair trading a series of vitriolic tracks that culminated in Lamar landing the \u201cmetaphorical killing blow\u201d with his megahit that May, Judge Jeannette A. Vargas said in her written opinion.
While the track\u2019s lyrics explicitly branded Drake as a pedophile, Vargas said, a reasonable listener could not have concluded that \u201cNot Like Us\u201d was conveying objective facts about the Canadian superstar.
\u201cAlthough the accusation that Plaintiff is a pedophile is certainly a serious one, the broader context of a heated rap battle, with incendiary language and offensive accusations hurled by both participants, would not incline the reasonable listener to believe that \u2018Not Like Us\u2019 imparts verifiable facts about Plaintiff,\u201d Vargas wrote.
After the decision Drake\u2019s legal team said in a statement: \u201cWe intend to appeal today\u2019s ruling, and we look forward to the Court of Appeals reviewing it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A defamation lawsuit that Drake brought against Universal Music Group was tossed out Thursday by a federal judge who said the lyrics in Kendrick Lamar\u2019s dis track \u201cNot Like Us\u201d were opinion.The feud between two of hip-hop\u2019s biggest stars erupted in the spring of 2024, with the pair trading a series of vitriolic tracks that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":46848,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[9306,11017,7960,10507,10933,1160,12005,6425,10454,5058,9028,9176,13307,6348,594],"class_list":["post-46847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-appeal","tag-canadian","tag-case","tag-court","tag-defamation","tag-drake","tag-judge","tag-kendrick-lamar","tag-killing","tag-music","tag-rap","tag-spring","tag-trading","tag-us","tag-who"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46847"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46849,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46847\/revisions\/46849"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}