If you thought it couldn’t get much worse for one-time rap mogul and current inmate Suge Knight, think again. Per NBC Los Angeles, a judge has reaffirmed a 2005 court order that Knight must pay former Death Row Records employee Lydia Harris $107 million dollars that he allegedly never paid her. For reference, that’s more than practically any human can afford or about one-fifth of what Michael Bloomberg spent to run for President for, like, nine days.
Knight was ordered to pay Harris $107 million in 2005 after Harris claimed that she and her husband, Michael, were early investors in Knight’s Death Row Records in 1989, and that she was the company’s first vice-president. In her original lawsuit against Knight, Harris claims that she was forced out of Death Row Records after the company began making money, and the judge ultimately ruled in her favor.
In a somewhat unexpected turn of events, on September 20, 2019, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David Sotelo voided the ruling against Knight and Death Row Records on Harris’s behalf. Her lawyer, Dermot Givens, claimed that Harris no longer wanted the money as she and Knight had reached an agreement and that her lawyers at Wasserman, Comden & Casselman used her to “wrongfully obtain the judgment†in 2005. However, Judge Sotelo reversed his ruling in December of 2019, reaffirming that Knight owed Harris over $100 million dollars and citing that Harris’s original lawyers at Wasserman, Comden & Casselman were owed 40 percent of the original judgement on a retainer agreement. When reinstating his decision, Judge Sotelo said, “This is a very old case with big names and big numbers.â€
So, whether or not Harris even wants $107 million from Suge Knight, it looks like she’s supposed to get 60 percent of it. It’s unclear how and when Suge will pay Harris as he’s currently serving a 28-year prison sentence for voluntary manslaughter after running over two men on the set of Straight Outta Compton. Maybe DaBaby can send him some of the royalties from “Suge� If not, he better hope that Ray-J gets working on that biopic of him right quick.