This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist News Business News Digital Legal
Another Cardi B court battle is pushed back into 2022
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 9 November 2021
Another Cardi B legal battle has been postponed, this one at the very last minute. Her legal dispute with YouTuber Latasha Kebe was due in court in Atlanta this week, but court proceedings have been pushed back to January next year because of an unspecified family emergency.
Cardi B – real name Belcalis Almanzar – sued Kebe in March 2019 in relation to a number of videos the YouTuber had posted to her unWinewithTashaK channel. In a lawsuit filed with the courts in the US state of Georgia, where Kebe lives, it was claimed that the YouTuber had variously stated, in her videos, that Almanzar “was a prostitute … was a user of cocaine … had and still has herpes … had and still has HPV … engaged in a debasing act with a beer bottle and … committed infidelity”.
Earlier this year, the judge overseeing the case – William M Ray II – declined to issue a summary judgement in Almanzar’s favour, concluding that there was a genuine dispute of material fact regarding whether or not some or all of the claims made by Kebe were in fact “false and defamatory”.
That was in no small part because of content submitted to the court by the YouTuber in which Almanzar seems to admit to being a sex worker and using drugs, thus suggesting that at least some of Kebe’s statements were not, in fact, false.
With a full court hearing to consider the case due to start today, legal reps for Almanzar requested a last minute postponement because of a “family emergency”.
That prompted Kebe’s team to call for the litigation to be dismissed entirely on the basis that the rapper wasn’t serious about pursuing the case. It was also alleged that Almanzar actually wants to postpone the court hearing so that she can relocate to LA for the American Music Awards that are taking place there later this month, something the rapper’s lawyers strongly deny.
Either way, Ray denied Kebe’s dismissal motion, and then proposed that the court battle be rescheduled to 5 Jan.
This is the second court battle Cardi B has had postponed in recent months. Last month she was due in court in California to fight litigation filed by model Kevin Brophy over her use of his image on the cover to the 2016 mixtape ‘Gangsta Bitch Music Vol 1’.
In that case, Almanzar argued that she is trying to keep travel to the minimum, having given birth to her second child in September and with all the ongoing COVID concerns. Fighting the case in California would take her away from her homes in Georgia and New Jersey, and would minimise the time she could spend with her new child.
After the judge agreed to push that court battle back into 2022 as well, Brophy sought to have the rapper sanctioned, arguing that a subsequent trip to Paris Fashion Week proved Almanzar was lying when she said that she was trying not to travel. However, the judge ruled Almanzar had not, in fact, misled the court, accepting the argument that the short trip to France was not the same as relocating to California for a three week trial.
