{"id":3744,"date":"2025-01-18T22:01:22","date_gmt":"2025-01-18T22:01:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/nelly-wants-penalties-for-frivolous-lawsuit-over-country-grammar\/"},"modified":"2025-01-18T22:01:22","modified_gmt":"2025-01-18T22:01:22","slug":"nelly-wants-penalties-for-frivolous-lawsuit-over-country-grammar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/nelly-wants-penalties-for-frivolous-lawsuit-over-country-grammar\/","title":{"rendered":"Nelly Wants Penalties for ‘Frivolous’ Lawsuit Over ‘Country Grammar’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tNelly<\/a> is asking a federal judge to punish the lawyers who recently sued him over his 2000 debut album Country Grammar<\/em>, arguing the case is \u201cobjectively frivolous\u201d and should \u201cnever have been brought in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lawsuit, filed last year, claims Nelly (Cornell Haynes) has failed to pay his former St. Lunatics bandmate Ali for his work on the album. But in a new motion Thursday (Jan. 16), Nelly\u2019s attorneys say those decades-old allegations are so \u201cbaseless\u201d that Ali and his lawyers must face legal penalties for filing them.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPlaintiff and his counsel should be sanctioned in the full amount \u2026 that Haynes has been forced to incur in defending this action,\u201d the rapper\u2019s lawyer Ken Freundlich<\/strong> writes. \u201cThat is because plaintiff\u2019s claims should never have been brought in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFreundlich says that if Ali\u2019s attorneys (Gail M. Walton<\/strong> and Precious Felder Gates<\/strong>) had done \u201ceven the barest factual investigation and legal research,\u201d they would have found fatal flaws in the lawsuit \u2014 most notably that it was filed years after the statute of limitations had expired. Instead, he says they doubled down after such shortcomings were exposed.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPlaintiff and his counsel\u2019s failure to withdraw their fatally flawed claims, and their insistence on pressing forward with frivolous assertions and legal arguments require a substantial sanction,\u201d Nelly\u2019s lawyers write. \u201c[This is] not only to compensate Haynes for the substantial legal fees and expenses he has been forced to incur in defending this action, but also to deter plaintiff and others who would flout the Copyright Act\u2019s rules and clear undisputed court precedent.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a response statement to Billboard <\/em>on Thursday, Felder Gates said Ali\u2019s legal team would \u201cvehemently defend\u201d against Nelly\u2019s motion and would continue to pursue their client\u2019s \u201cundeniable right to be properly compensated\u201d for his alleged work on Country Grammar<\/em>: \u201cIt is both unethical and unlawful for artists and their corporate partners to exploit the creative work of writers, deceiving them out of their rightful credits and fair compensation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNelly 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<\/em> \u2014 which spent 5 weeks atop the Billboard 200 \u2014 Nelly broke away into a solo career that later reached superstar heights with his 2002 chart-topping singles \u201cHot in Herre\u201d and \u201cDilemma.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a copyright lawsuit filed in September in Manhattan federal court, all four of those bandmates accused Nelly of cheating them out of compensation for contributions they allegedly made to Country Grammar<\/em>. They claimed that he had \u201cmanipulated\u201d them into falsely thinking they\u2019d be paid, then never made good on the promises.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut a month later, the lawsuit took a strange turn: Nelly\u2019s lawyers filed a letter warning that Lee, Kyjuan and Spud had never actually wanted to sue Nelly and that they had not given legal authorization to the lawyers who filed the lawsuit to include them as plaintiffs.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThey are hereby demanding you remove their names forthwith,\u201d Nelly\u2019s lawyers wrote in a letter to Walton. \u201cFailure to do so will cause them to explore any and all legal remedies available to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn November, Ali\u2019s attorneys filed an updated version of the lawsuit listing only him as a client and vowed to fight on: \u201cWhile others may have chosen to withdraw, his dedication to his artistic legacy and his rights as a creator remains unwavering,\u201d Felder Gates said in a statement to Billboard <\/em>at the time.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in Thursday\u2019s motion, Nelly\u2019s attorneys argue that the case has deeper problems than simply improper plaintiffs.<\/p>\n

\n\tThey say the lawsuit was filed many years after the Copyright Act\u2019s three-year statute of limitations had expired since Nelly had clearly \u201crepudiated\u201d Ali\u2019s demand for payment years before he filed his case. And they say that when Ali\u2019s attorneys refiled the case under just his name, they tried to sneakily remove certain dates to \u201chide\u201d that fatal flaw.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPlaintiff omits the dates of repudiation in his [amended lawsuit],\u201d Freundlich says. \u201cThis ruse does not save the claim from being time-barred. In fact, all it does is elucidate how Plaintiff and his counsel are engaging in sanctionable conduct.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a penalty, Nelly\u2019s lawyers want the judge to order Ali and his attorneys to repay all legal fees and other costs that the star has incurred defending the case. Even for just a few months of copyright litigation, that figure could reach thousands of dollars when top law firms are involved in a case.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nelly is asking a federal judge to punish the lawyers who recently sued him over his 2000 debut album Country Grammar, arguing the case is \u201cobjectively frivolous\u201d and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3745,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3489,4320,3490,303,3487,4319],"class_list":["post-3744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-country","tag-frivolous","tag-grammar","tag-lawsuit","tag-nelly","tag-penalties"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3744","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=3744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}