Nicki Minaj spent election day posing outside a New Hampshire polling station, and at almost the same moment her old legal team was asking a Los Angeles judge to make her pay up. The firm filed its renewed request within minutes of her public appearance on Tuesday.
Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani says Minaj breached their agreement and now owes $295,605 for services, fees and interest. According to the filing, the “Starships” rapper hasn’t responded to the firm’s lawsuit “in any way.”
The work in question was a copyright case. Minaj was accused of lifting the instrumentation and beat of “onmysleeve,” a song by Julius Johnson, for her track “I Lied.”
That dispute ended in a private settlement and was dismissed, but the lawyers who handled it say their invoice never got settled.
The firm first sued over the money in March. Since more than 30 days have passed since Minaj was served, it’s now asking the Los Angeles County Superior Court to grant the full amount as a default award, with a hearing set for Nov. 16. Reps for Minaj did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
The rapper’s attention seems firmly elsewhere. NBC10Boston reported that she showed up outside a polling station in Derry, N.H., with a police escort, posing beside a sign for Anthony DiLorenzo, the Trump-endorsed Republican running for Congress. DiLorenzo lost to Democrat Stefany Shaheen.
That stop came a week after Minaj joined Trump at a rally in Michigan, flying in aboard Air Force One and leading the crowd in a “We love Trump” chant. “
We don’t want our children to be bombarded with sex changes, right?” she told the audience, before offering to back Trump if he sought a third term.
Trump returned the attention in his own way. By the way, I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before: Nicki Minaj! That’s hard to miss,” he said from the stage.
On the plane, Minaj staged a mock interview playing White House press secretary, calling Trump a “great guy” and a sharp businessman who had “won three elections.” He has won two. It’s a strange turn for an artist who once vowed never to endorse him.
The political bet didn’t pay off on Tuesday either. The midterms went badly for Trump and his allies, with Democrats taking control of both the House and the Senate.
This also isn’t the first time an unpaid debt has caught up with her. In January, Minaj narrowly avoided a court-ordered sale of her $20 million Los Angeles mansion after paying a $500,000 default judgment to a security guard. He had accused her husband, Kenneth Petty, of assaulting him backstage at a 2019 concert in Germany.
That case only ended once the stakes got serious. Her former lawyers are now pushing for the same kind of pressure, and Nov. 16 is the next date that matters.
