{"id":10934,"date":"2026-06-11T11:29:02","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T11:29:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/chris-brown-settles-lawsuit-over-sensational-monalisa-royalties\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T11:29:02","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T11:29:02","slug":"chris-brown-settles-lawsuit-over-sensational-monalisa-royalties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/chris-brown-settles-lawsuit-over-sensational-monalisa-royalties\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Brown Settles Lawsuit Over \u2018Sensational\u2019 & \u2018Monalisa\u2019 Royalties"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tChris Brown has reached a settlement to exit a lawsuit that accused him of withholding royalties from a co-writer on two tracks.<\/p>\n

\n\tA Monday (June 8) court notice, first obtained and reported by Billboard<\/em>, says Brown and his publisher Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) have \u201creached a settlement in principle\u201d with songwriter Steve Chokpelle. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, and lawyers for both sides did not immediately return requests for comment on Tuesday (June 9).<\/p>\n

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\n\tChokpelle sued Brown and UMPG this past February, alleging he\u2019d been paid \u201cno revenues whatsoever\u201d for helping craft two of the R&B star\u2019s hits: \u201cMonalisa,\u201d which hit No. 8 on the Billboard U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart in 2022, and \u201cSensational,\u201d a single off Brown\u2019s 2023 album 11:11 <\/em>that topped Billboard<\/em>\u2018s Mainstream R&B\/Hip-Hop Airplay chart.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDefendants sustained a tremendous benefit, and shall continue to receive tremendous benefit, by [earning] millions in revenues, acclaim, accolades and goodwill from the commercial exploitation of \u2018Monalisa\u2019 and \u2018Sensational,\u2019\u201d read the lawsuit. \u201cAs a result of defendants\u2019 failure to acknowledge plaintiff\u2019s authorship and copyright ownership interests, and by their failure to compensate plaintiff, defendants have been unjustly enriched.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSpecifically, Chokpelle claims he wrote the \u201cMonalisa\u201d lyrics during a 2020 session with Brown and fellow singer Sean Kingston at Brown\u2019s Los Angeles-area home. Later, he alleges that he penned the lyrics for \u201cSensational\u201d in 2023 alongside producer Onyekachi Emenalo, who goes by the moniker Krazytunez.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn court papers responding to the lawsuit last month, attorneys for Brown and UMPG argued that the claims should be dismissed due to the statute of limitations and other legal deficiencies. That motion was still pending when the settlement was reached.<\/p>\n

\n\tChokpelle also sued Kingston in his original lawsuit, and Brown\u2019s settlement has not resolved those claims. The \u201cBeautiful Girls\u201d singer, who has not yet answered Chokpelle in court, is currently serving a federal prison sentence for defrauding luxury goods vendors of more than $1 million.<\/p>\n


\"Billboard
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Chris Brown has reached a settlement to exit a lawsuit that accused him of withholding royalties from a co-writer on two tracks. A Monday (June 8) court notice, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10935,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1683,2662,303,8136,1219,8135,322],"class_list":["post-10934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-brown","tag-chris","tag-lawsuit","tag-monalisa","tag-royalties","tag-sensational","tag-settles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}