Former Bad Boy rapper G.Dep has confirmed that he was among the label’s artists who had their publishing returned by Diddy in 2023. The gesture came while he was still incarcerated, and he said the paperwork was never completed.
Diddy’s move to give Bad Boy artists back their publishing reached G.Dep in the final stretch of his prison sentence. Rather than a clean resolution, it left him with unfinished business on the outside.
“I didn’t finish that deal though, man. So, I definitely got to finish that deal up,” he said.
The timing, he explained, worked against him. The offer arrived as his release date approached, and negotiations were still in motion when he walked free.
“It happened right before I came home,” he said, adding that he was dealing with the lawyers and the two sides were going back and forth on some details before his release.
G.Dep came home in 2024 at 49 years old, having served roughly 13 years and seven months. He did not say what remains outstanding on the publishing agreement, only that closing it is a priority.
Midway through his sentence, in 2021, G.Dep lost his former labelmate Black Rob. He said the death hit him harder than almost anything he had experienced, to the point that he broke down in his cell.
“I never cried like that,” he said. He explained that he had lost family members before, but this loss landed differently. “This was my comrade,” he added.
The two men came up together, and G.Dep described a bond rooted in shared experience. They faced the same struggles, saw the world from the same vantage point and came from the same neighborhood. “It just hit different, man,” he said.
He admitted he had not been around Black Rob in about 15 years before his passing, so he could not speak to all of his circumstances. He did know that his old friend had been unwell. “His health was really bad, too,” he said.
G.Dep’s long sentence followed his decision to confess and turn himself in, a choice that has followed him ever since.
Asked whether he walked out believing he had done the right thing, or regretting the years it cost him, he framed the decision in spiritual terms.
“I feel like this is something that had something to do with my eternal well-being,” he said. He explained that once he surrendered, he stopped second guessing the outcome. “I kind of left it up to the creator, man,” he said. “I kind of just took my hands off the wheel.”
What followed, in his telling, was a period of steady personal growth. “I got healthier,” he said. “I started reading more. I started understanding myself a lot more.” He also pursued his education behind bars. “I went to school. I wind up getting my degree,” he recalled.
Perhaps most significantly, he left prison sober. “I wasn’t on drugs anymore,” he said.
For G.Dep, the conclusion is clear. He believes incarceration helped him far more than it held him back, and he is blunt about where his life was heading before he surrendered. “I was going nowhere fast,” he said.
Now home, sober and holding a degree, the former Bad Boy artist has one piece of his past still waiting to be settled. Closing out the publishing deal Diddy set in motion while he was inside appears to be next on his list.
