Fresh off the success of her debut album, Invasion of Privacy, budding superstar Cardi B is being hauled into court by her former manager. On Thursday, the rapper and former Love & Hip Hop castmember was hit with a $10 million lawsuit that asserts she is breaching her contract with Klenord Raphael, known as “Shaft,” and has defamed her former manager on Instagram.
According to the complaint, Cardi B (real name: Belcalis Almanzar) executed a management agreement with WorldStar Marketing Group in 2015. The deal granted WorldStar one year of exclusivity to be her personal manager, states the court papers, with options for an additional four years. WorldStar also got 20 percent of her gross income. The complaint also discusses a recording agreement with KSR Group, which then entered into a distribution deal with Atlantic Records, which put out Invasion of Privacy in March. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.
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Shaft takes credit for Cardi B’s rise.
Through the complaint, he says he “conceived, arranged and orchestrated” Cardi B becoming “the biggest music sensation on the planet,” allegedly discovering her when she was a party host, supposedly landing her the role on VH-1’s reality show Love & Hip Hop and securing her major-record deal.
The disruption in the relationship is partly blamed on an individual named Patientce Foster (spelled just that way, according to a footnote), who allegedly told Cardi B that Shaft was “robbing” her of money through side deals. Foster is a co-defendant in the case for this remark.
Then, there’s Offset, a member of the popular hip-hop group Migos and Cardi B’s fiance.
Migos is repped by Quality Control Management, and the complaint alleges Offset is responsible for steering Cardi B away from Shaft to Quality Control. The new managers allegedly condemned Shaft’s handling of Cardi B and allegedly took advantage of the distrust whipped up by Foster. Quality Control is being sued for tortious interference for its client poach.
Shaft and his companies assert the management deal with Cardi B is still valid and they are also annoyed by what the superstar is writing on social media.
According to the complaint, “On March 27, 2018, Cardi B double-downed on her disparagement of Shaft and his companies by making publicly available a video stream using Instagram’s live broadcasting capability in which she says: ‘There’s a lot of people that I had to cutoff, a lot of friends, a lot of management, a lot of people that I had to cutoff because … one thing I notice … people don’t give a f[*]ck about you.'”
The plaintiffs allege this has been reasonably understood by members of the public to mean that Shaft was stealing from Cardi B. The lawsuit makes note of how others responded to the message while offering, “Cardi B never corrected the false belief that they robbed her, thereby validating that falsehood by her silence.”
The full complaint is below.
