UMG Calls Drake Hypocritical in Appellate Brief Over Not Like Us Lawsuit

Universal Music Group filed an 83-page appellate brief this week that essentially tells Drake to stop embarrassing himself. The label’s response, submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, is the latest chapter in a lawsuit that started feeling redundant the moment it was filed.

Here is the recap. Drake sued UMG in January 2025, claiming Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” defamed him by calling him a pedophile. A federal judge tossed the case last October, finding that Lamar’s lyrics were “nonactionable opinion” delivered in the context of a rap battle where both artists were hurling accusations. Drake appealed. UMG just fired back, and they are not being polite about it.

The label’s brief calls Drake’s legal arguments “astoundingly hypocritical,” pointing out that Drake had no trouble using UMG’s platform to attack Lamar with equally vicious language when the shoe was on the other foot. Now that someone hit back, Drake wants a different set of rules applied to words directed at him.

The brief also draws a line in the sand about what this case is actually about. Drake’s legal team argues that millions of listeners might have believed the pedophile accusation was literally true, making it defamatory. UMG counters that this logic would “critically undermine a highly creative art form built on exaggeration, insult, and wordplay.” You cannot simultaneously love rap for its combative energy and then run to court the moment the combat goes somewhere uncomfortable.

The First Circuit judge who dismissed the case put it clearly. Lamar’s hook was “a direct callback to Drake’s lyrics” in a “heated rap battle.” A reasonable listener would not walk away thinking they had received a factual report on Drake’s personal conduct. They would understand they had just watched two of the biggest rappers alive trade the sharpest possible blows.

That context matters. The rap beef with Lamar was not a private dispute that spilled into public accidentally. Drake initiated multiple public rounds of it. “Family Matters,” his response to Lamar, accused Lamar of domestic abuse. That track was not accompanied by a disclaimer saying the accusations were artistic hyperbole. Drake played the game exactly the way the game is played, and then complained when his opponent played it better.

None of this means the case will not drag on. Drake’s team has argued that courts are inconsistent about rap lyrics, using them as literal evidence in criminal cases while refusing to treat them the same way in civil ones. That is actually a real tension in the legal system, and it deserves a serious discussion. But that discussion is not helped by a lawsuit that looks less like a principled stand and more like a very expensive grudge.

The appeals court will hear the case in coming months. The outcome will matter beyond Drake. A ruling that treats rap lyrics as potentially defamatory statements of fact would reshape how artists in the genre engage with each other publicly. It would insert legal liability into a tradition of verbal combat that has defined hip-hop since its early years. That would be a genuinely bad outcome, and not just for Drake’s opponents.

For now, UMG’s brief is the most interesting document in this ongoing mess. It is a label defending its artist while also making the more important argument: that protecting the expressive freedom of rap as a form is worth fighting for, even when the specific song in question cost someone a comfortable narrative about themselves.