Cardi B isn’t scared of a courtroom. “Please, I wish on the brightest star for you to sue me,” she told BZR WKND Jamaica promoter Ryan Burke during a Nov. 9 Instagram Live, adding that a lawsuit would let her “really get money out of you for real.”
The whole fight comes down to money. Burke went on Jamaica’s CVM News on Nov. 9 and claimed Cardi was paid her full $2.5 million fee for a headlining set she never played, and that his team asked for it back without hearing anything. “She was paid in full,” he said, per the Jamaica Observer.
Cardi tells a very different story. She says she received roughly $900,000 of an agreed $1 million advance, which made up half her total fee, and that a production payment due Sept. 17 never arrived on time.
According to the rapper, a $750,000 transfer only landed after she told the team she was pulling out. She sent it back because her equipment was still sitting in Florida, and flights, hotels and cargo had become too expensive on such short notice.
She also took issue with what she saw as an attempt to make her cover production for the entire event. “This is a festival, and I’m headlining. This is two different things,” she said.
Her camp is backing her up. A representative told Billboard the organizers “failed to fulfill their contractual payment obligations, constituting a material breach of the agreement,” while her UTA agent Mike “Mike G” Guirguis posted on X that she “never received her full fee for the Jamaica show.”
BZR WKND isn’t budging either. In its own statement to Billboard, the festival says Cardi skipped promotional duties after the deposit, including a required official announcement video, and insists it made “the agreed-upon payments in full directly to Cardi B.”
The promoters say they are taking steps toward legal action to protect the brand and the stakeholders affected.
The Jamaican government got pulled into the mess too. Cardi had suggested public money backed the show, which led the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport to deny any payment and note that spending is limited while Hurricane Melissa recovery continues.
On her Nov. 10 stream, Cardi apologized to the government and claimed Burke had emailed her team saying officials invested. “Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not cause like I said, everything was a finesse,” she said.
This was supposed to be her first stadium headlining show in the Caribbean, a “Cardi B & Friends” set hosted by dancehall star Spice with Keyshia Cole, Ding Dong, Shaneil Muir, Stalk Ashley and DJ MAC on the bill. Billboard first revealed the booking on Aug. 4, and Cardi officially withdrew on Oct. 8.
The festival, first planned for Oct. 16 to 19, has since shrunk to two days on Dec. 19 and 20. Burke says Cardi’s team had floated the Dec. 20 makeup date before that fell through as well.
Cardi says she isn’t returning the deposit and is threatening a defamation countersuit of her own. Meanwhile she heads to GTA 6: The Festival in Miami on Nov. 21, then Toronto on Nov. 24 to collect Billboard Canada’s first Global Woman of the Year award.
