The record label called Drake and his lawyers’ latest legal motion “absurd.”
Universal Music Group has pushed back against Drake’s lawyers who requested the label to “collect, review and produce” communications from British chief executive Lucian Grainge because he was “personally involved in decisions made regarding the marketing and promotion of [Not Like Us] around its release,” The Guardian reports. The motion is the latest development in Drake’s lawsuit against UMG over Kendrick Lamar’s viral diss track, which contained lyrics calling Drake a pedophile.
The suit, filed in January 2025, alleged that UMG “intended to convey the specific, unmistakable and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal paedophile, and to suggest that the public should resort to vigilante justice in response.”
Of the latest motion, UMG’s lawyers said that Drake’s argument “defy credulity” and are a waste of time. They have called for the motion to be denied.
“The premise of Drake’s motion – that he could not have lost a rap battle unless it was the product of some imagined secret conspiracy going to the top of UMG’s corporate structure – is absurd,” Lawyer Rollin A. Ransom said. “Sir Lucian is the CEO of a multinational enterprise; his days are spent determining and implementing global strategy, not vetting individual tracks or album covers or driving the release and promotional plans for any one recording.”
In March, Universal called the suit “utterly without merit” and filed a motion for it to be thrown out entirely. The motion claimed that the lyrics in “Not Like Us” contain “nonactionable opinion and rhetorical hyperbole, not fact.” It also noted that Drake willingly took part in the rap battle, arguing that “diss tracks are a popular and celebrated art form centred around outrageous insults, and they would be severely chilled if Drake’s suit were permitted to proceed.”