Nelly’s magic carpet ride of a life, which included becoming a newlywed husband and welcoming a newborn baby with his wife Ashanti, has just crashed and burned in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit initiated by his former bandmates.
Members of his old group, the St. Lunatics, are suing the Country Grammar rapper for $50M for several reasons.
According to court documents obtained by All Hip Hop, St. Lunatics group members Ali, Murphy Lee, Kyjuan, and City Spud accuse Nelly of copyright infringement and unjust enrichment.
Nelly, whose real name is Cornell Iral Haynes Jr., began his hip-hop career with the St. Lunatics around 1993.
The former bandmates claim they never received proper credit or compensation for their contributions to Nelly’s blockbuster debut album, Country Grammar, which exploded like fireworks upon pop culture in 2000. It has sold over 10M copies to be certified diamond and remains one of the bestselling rap albums of all time.
The St. Lunatics charge Nelly, 49, with claiming sole credit for the tracks the crew composed together, most specifically “Batter Up,” “Thicky Thick Girl,” and “Steal The Show.”
This is not Nelly’s only recent entanglement. The “Hot in Herre” emcee is still dealing with the legal fallout from his Aug. arrest for alleged possession of ecstasy inside a casino in Maryland Heights, MO, a 15-mile drive west of St. Louis.
Nelly’s team has yet to respond publicly to the lawsuit, but the St. Lunatics had plenty to say in court via their attorney.
“Despite repeated assurances by defendant Haynes that plaintiffs would receive their writing credit and publishing income for creating the Original Compositions, plaintiffs, sometime in 2020, eventually discovered that defendant Haynes had been lying to them the entire time,” the lawsuit reads, according to the hip hop publication.
“Plaintiffs eventually discovered that not only did they not receive any credit as authors and/or creators of the Original Compositions, but that defendant Haynes, and others, took full credit for creating the Original Compositions contained in the Infringing Album.”
