Drake accuses Kendrick Lamar of character assassination
Drake’s expanded lawsuit against UMG claims Lamar's Super Bowl performance damaged his reputation
Just as everyone thought that one of the most talked-about rivalries in hip-hop is finally over, Drake comes in and makes it even more personal.
The feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar intensified last year when the two rappers hurled personal insults at each other in a series of diss tracks.
The conflict led to Drake filing a lawsuit against Universal Music Group (UMG) and Spotify in November for allegedly conspiring to inflate streaming figures of Lamar’s Not Like Us.
The 38-year-old withdrew his petition and filed a new one for defamation against UMG for allegedly promoting the diss track.
Drake has now expanded the lawsuit that alleges, in addition to the previous claims, that Lamar’s performance during the halftime show of Super Bowl 59 destroyed his image.
The 37-year-old infamously rapped Not Like Us back in February, which refers to Drake as a “pedophile.”
The controversial word was censored during the live broadcast, which was used as evidence in the complaint that both the NFL and UMG were aware of the inflammatory nature of the song's lyrics.
According to the court documents filed on Wednesday, Lamar’s gig was “orchestrated to assassinate [Drake's] character” and also mentioned the artist's performance at the 2025 Grammy Awards, where he sang the same track, which allegedly further damaged Drake’s reputation.
The development comes days after a district judge dismissed UMG’s motion to pause discovery, which gave Drake the legal right to seek access to confidential documents such as the contract details between UMG and Lamar.
When did the Drake and Kendrick Lamar feud begin?
The highly publicised rivalry between Drake and Lamar originally began in 2013 when the Canadian rapper responded to the Compton native’s verse on the track Control by Big Sean.
After years of subtle jabs, the feud became mainstream in 2023 when J. Cole collaborated with Drake on First Person Shooter.
In the song, Cole claimed that he, Drake, and Lamar are the “big three” rappers of contemporary hip-hop, a notion that was dismissed by Lamar, who proclaimed in Like That that it is “just big me.”
The beef escalated in 2024 when the two artists traded insults in diss tracks such as Family Matters and Meet The Grahams.
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