Universal Music Group have moved to dismiss Drake’s defamation suit, characterising it as “a misguided attempt” by the Canadian rapper to “salve his wounds” after he “lost a rap battle” with rival Kendrick Lamar.
In the motion, filed on Monday in the US district court for the southern district of New York, Universal Music Group (UMG), which represents both artists, claimed that Drake “lost a rap battle that he provoked and in which he willingly participated.
“Instead of accepting the loss like the unbothered rap artist he often claims to be, he has sued his own record label in a misguided attempt to salve his wounds. Plaintiff’s complaint is utterly without merit and should be dismissed with prejudice”.
The long-term rivalry between Drake and Kendrick Lamar escalated in March 2024 with the rapid-fire, tit-for-tat release of diss tracks by both artists, culminating in the release of Not Like Us on 4 May, in which Lamar framed Drake as a “certified pedophile”. The track proved immensely popular, topping the Billboard Global 200 chart and winning Record and Song of the Year at the 2025 Grammys.
Drake filed a lawsuit in January accusing UMG of defamation and harassment, and alleging that UMG “approved, published and launched a campaign to create a viral hit out of a rap track” that was “intended to convey the specific, unmistakable, and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal pedophile, and to suggest that the public should resort to vigilante justice in response”.
Drake’s suit noted that the artwork for Not Like Us features a picture of his Toronto home with markers used to identify the homes of registered sex offenders; and referred to a shooting that occurred outside the residence days after the track’s release in which a security guard was injured, and two attempted trespassings in the subsequent days.
“This lawsuit is not about the artist who created ‘Not Like Us,’” the filing by Drake’s team read. “It is, instead, entirely about UMG, the music company that decided to publish, promote, exploit, and monetize allegations that it understood were not only false, but dangerous.”
In its motion to dismiss, Universal argue that Drake fails to make a claim for defamation, saying that Not Like Us “conveys nonactionable opinion and rhetorical hyperbole, not fact,” and noting that the rapper has relied on UMG to promote his own diss tracks against Lamar and others.
Drake’s lawsuit, UMG says in its filing, “disregards the other Drake and Lamar diss tracks that surrounded ‘Not Like Us’ as well as the conventions of the diss track genre … diss tracks are a popular and celebrated artform centered around outrageous insults, and they would be severely chilled if Drake’s suit were permitted to proceed.”
“Less than three years ago, Drake himself signed a public petition criticizing ‘the trend of prosecutors using artists’ creative expression against them’ by treating rap lyrics as literal fact,” UMG’s motion continues. “As Drake recognized, when it comes to rap, ‘[t]he final work is a product of the artist’s vision and imagination’.
“Drake was right then and is wrong now.”
Universal also denies that its promotion of Not Like Us invited harassment of Drake, stating that the rapper is attempting “to contort violent metaphors in the lyrics into incitement”. “As with his defamation claim, Drake seeks to chill a form of artistic expression that he himself has embraced,” the motion reads.
In a statement provided to Variety, Drake’s attorney Michael J. Gottlieb responded to Universal’s motion to dismiss, saying: “UMG wants to pretend that this is about a rap battle in order to distract its shareholders, artists and the public from a simple truth: a greedy company is finally being held responsible for profiting from dangerous misinformation that has already resulted in multiple acts of violence.
“This motion is a desperate ploy by UMG to avoid accountability, but we have every confidence that this case will proceed and continue to uncover UMG’s long history of endangering, abusing and taking advantage of its artists.”
