Even by Azealia Banks standards, the summer of 2020 was eventful. That June, in between claiming to have slept with Dave Chappelle (he didn’t confirm or deny) and releasing a favorably reviewed single (“Black Madonna”), the rapper and singer-songwriter took to social media to make a sweeping request of Ice Cube. She asked the actor and former N.W.A. member for help getting royalties she claimed were owed her by veteran entertainment executive Jeff Kwatinetz in his role as CEO of Prospect Park, the label and management company that released Banks’ influential debut album, 2014’s Broke With Expensive Taste.
Three years later, Banks’ royalties claims against Kwatinetz remain alive in court, if hanging on by a thread. Kwatinetz and Prospect Park sued Banks and her business Lasagna Girl, denying her financial allegations but also accusing the musician of “terrifying conduct [that] appears to be part of a coordinated extortion campaign.” Banks later countersued, fleshing out her money complaints but also insinuating alleged impropriety. In recent months, Banks sat down for a deposition, and her lawyer abruptly quit. Last week, the artist was granted extra time to gather information and testimony, according to court documents obtained by Pitchfork. In the court documents, Banks’ substitute lawyer claims Kwatinetz and his camp have been “desperately trying” to “conceal and spoil evidence.”
In a hearing on October 16, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Serena R. Murillo granted Banks’ emergency application for an extension. Kwatinetz and Banks had each asked for early wins in the case—“summary adjudication” and “summary judgment,” respectively—and the judge said that she would postpone the hearing on the requests, previously scheduled for October 23, to December 18. Meanwhile, in a ruling on October 23, Murillo gave Banks another breather: The judge granted the musician’s request to postpone the trial, previously scheduled for February 13, 2024, to no sooner than July 9. “The Court finds there is good cause to continue trial due to Cross-Complainants’ [i.e., Banks’ and her camp’s] inability to obtain essential testimony, documents, or other material evidence, despite Cross-Complainants[’] diligent efforts,” Murillo wrote.
Banks’ request to push back the trial date was unopposed, but her bid for more time to seek evidence was not. In fact, court records show that Judge Murillo rejected a similar request on October 6. Kwatinetz’s lawyer, Paul N. Sorrell, had opposed the earlier application for relief as “rambling” and baseless; likewise, Sorrell rebuked follow-up attempts as “frivolous,” “vague,” and “untimely.” What changed? John Vafa, who officially subbed in as Banks’ lawyer on August 30, following her previous lawyer’s sudden departure, claimed in the initial October 5 filing that his predecessor had not yet organized or given him access to all of the purportedly 10 gigabytes’ worth of documents in the case. When Vafa, an entertainment lawyer who represented Banks in a highly publicized criminal matter in 2017, applied for more time again on October 9, he included a document he claimed he’d received just one day earlier: an email from the previous lawyer to Kwatinetz’s attorneys outlining what Vafa described in court records as “accounting mistakes.”
Banks posted screenshots of the October 16 order to her Instagram story, writing, “Just when you thought it was safe!”
Vafa also applauded the ruling. “After unnecessary litigation and pressure caused when recently substituting this matter, we are happy that the Court agreed with our Ex Parte Application to allow more discovery,” he told Pitchfork in a statement. “We look forward to uncovering more evidence to defeat Kwatinetz’s claims and bolster Ms. Banks’ claims against Kwatinetz. Litigation is burdensome for all parties, including unearthing more evidence. Whether the dispute could be resolved informally or for the case to be decided by a jury is for the parties and the Court to decide. With that said, we are optimistic about the outcome for Ms. Banks.”
Michael Weinsten, a lawyer for Kwatinetz, downplayed the recent developments. “As for the trial continuance, we stipulated to a trial continuance after Azealia’s prior counsel filed a motion to withdraw from the case,” Weinsten wrote in an email response to Pitchfork. “That motion [to withdraw] was filed shortly after Ms. Banks’ deposition wherein she showed up two hours late, refused to answer the majority of questions asked, engaged in wild and bizarre antics and then walked out after only a few hours of questioning. Frankly, it is not surprising that yet another lawyer dropped her.”
The next hearing is scheduled for November 22, according to court records. The subject will be a request, filed by Kwatinetz’s camp on September 8, to force Banks to appear at a deposition for seven hours and pay a $10,000 fine. According to the filing, a previous deposition of Banks, on July 23, “was a pure travesty,” with Banks arriving “two hours late based on a lie about car trouble” and “refus[ing] to answer substantive questions.” Per the document, her behavior was not only “obstreperous” and “outrageous,” but also “deranged” and “unhinged.”
Transcript excerpts included in the filing are wide-ranging and contentious. They begin with Banks being asked what medications she’s on and end, many expletives and epithets later, with her referring to the recent death of her mother, slamming a lawyer as a “white piece of shit,” and announcing she’s leaving. Near the start, asked where she had been for the scheduled first two hours of the deposition, Banks testified, “In my hotel straight ironing my beautiful wig.” Asked about her previous Instagram claim that Kwatinetz “used to snort coke out of [her] asshole,” Banks testified, “I want you to bring that up in court so I can become America’s, like, greatest fucking female comedian.” Brittany Murphy and Harvey Weinstein made cameos, again via Banks’ prior social media activity. Asked repeatedly whether she has “a problem with Jewish people,” Banks testified: “No, but I have a problem with you. And if you happen to be Jewish and you happen to take that in some sort of way, then that’s you. But, no, actually I love Jewish dick. Thank you.” (Asked if she had “a problem with white people,” she responded similarly: “No, but I got a problem with you.”)
Later, per Kwatinetz’s filings, Banks called the lawyer “a nappy-headed Jew with nothing to do,” a “misinformed racist,” and a “cracker,” and offered to “send [him] some base-level books on, like, African traditional religions.” When the lawyer quoted from her previous obscenity-strewn statements, pronouncing each of the expletives except saying “the N-word” in place of “n—-a,” she questioned why he wouldn’t say “n—a” and requested that he please stop with the euphemism: “It’s a little more offensive than just saying the word,” Banks testified. Asked to verify her own cross-complaint, she testified, “All of this is false bullshit.” At one point, Banks was asked for specifics about a life insurance policy. “Do you understand that I am a thespian?” she testified, according to the documents. “I’m a dancer. I’m a singer. These are not—this is not my forte.” Kwatinetz’s lawyer said, “They’re just questions, Ms. Banks.” Elsewhere, she testified, “Did he just ask me what LMFAO means?” Banks even appeared to quote fellow Harlem rappers the Diplomats, her remarks evidently mistranscribed in the documents as, “You want to be down with the dip set [i.e., hip-hop icons Dipset], you’ve got to get your lips wet.”
In another portion of the transcript excerpts, Banks directly addressed her personal and financial situation in the summer of 2020, when she first posted about the dispute. “It was in the middle of the George Floyd,” she testified, according to the documents. “Everything was looting and rioting. Jeff Kwatinetz had not given me enough money to do anything. I was fucking starving. My credit score had been fucked up because Jeff had been stealing my money that I needed to be reinvesting in myself. So for a very—for a good year and a half, I was homeless. I was sleeping in my storage space.”
Banks testified, too, on how going viral online can strip away nuance. “Keep in mind that whenever any celebrity posts anything to social media, these other, like, little micro-blogger people, they take it, and they truncate it, and they make it, like, you know make it more sensational than it is,” she said, per the documents. “So once my 24-hour story has gone down, then—then you’ll have—you’ll have stuff like this. There’s so many videos of me just being, like, taken out of context.”
Jeff Kwatinetz has had multiple professional lives since graduating from Harvard Law School in 1991. By the end of the decade, he’d founded the talent management company the Firm, which went on to manage musicians such as Britney Spears, Snoop Dogg, and Linkin Park, as well as film clients including Cameron Diaz, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Martin Scorsese. After the Firm shuttered in 2008, Kwatinetz launched Prospect Park, backing online revivals of long-running daytime soap operas while keeping a hand in music with acts such as Ice Cube, Korn, and Five Finger Death Punch. The digital-TV department filed for bankruptcy protection in 2014, and Prospect Park broke apart not long after Broke With Expensive Taste’s release, with just Banks, Ice Cube, and P.O.D. remaining as “established” clients, per Billboard. Banks herself split with Prospect Park in 2015.
In July 2020, a month after beseeching Ice Cube, Banks urged fans to stop streaming Broke With Expensive Taste, the album containing her earlier breakout hit “212.” In a series of Instagram posts, Banks claimed Kwatinetz “stole all the money” from the release and sent her a $15,000 check. That August, Banks, who has since disclosed a bipolar diagnosis, sparked concerns among fans with posts indicating suicidal thoughts. Then, in September 2020, Kwatinetz sued Banks. Per the complaint, while Banks’ royalties claims were “blatantly false,” she also “threatened the lives of Kwatinetz and his wife and young child” and took part in “an attempted burglary of Kwatinetz’s Los Angeles house.”
Beyond asserting Banks’ “history of violence and drug abuse” and “caustic personality,” Kwatinetz’s lawsuit touches on her mental health. “Banks’ claims run the gamut of the absurd and could easily be ignored and written off as the rantings of a lunatic,” the complaint alleges, “but her recent rants took an ominous and dangerous turn.” Court records show, however, that, on March 18, 2021, Kwatinetz asked for his lawsuit to be dismissed without prejudice, meaning that it could be re-filed.
Settlement talks failed, and, almost a year later, on September 20, 2021, Kwatinetz filed a nearly identical lawsuit. “Unfortunately, even after a months-long audit and extensive negotiations,” the complaint alleges, “Banks and [her company] Lasagna Girl are claiming that they supposedly have a right to receive more than a million dollars in royalties from Banks’ 2014 album, Broke With Expensive Taste.”
Then, on November 18, 2021, Banks hit back, suing Kwatinetz for claims including breach of contract, fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, and negligence. In the counter-complaint, Banks accuses Kwatinetz of “blurring the lines between a fiduciary and a romantic suitor so that he could take financial advantage” of her when she was 23 and he was a 49-year-old CEO.
Along with the personal allegations, the filing details Banks’ financial objections. According to Banks’ counter-complaint, Prospect Park didn’t provide its first accounting statement under its deal with Banks until July 1, 2020—more than five and a half years after the release of Broke With Expensive Taste—and paid out “the miniscule [sic] sum of $15,344.94.” Per the same document, Prospect Park reported almost $1.5 million in album revenues and $1.3 million in costs, and Banks was entitled to 50 percent of “net receipts”—that is, profits after expenses and taxes. Banks and her team contend that Prospect Park’s actual revenues from the album were higher and the label “did not pay for the cost of the production of the album,” which had been long delayed during her previous stint with Interscope Records. (The filing doesn’t explain why $15,000 is so much less than half of the difference between $1.5 million and $1.3 million.)
Since then, the competing lawsuits have largely flown under the radar. Banks’ previous attorney didn’t give a reason for his departure in his court filing requesting to withdraw from the case. And, while Banks has remained a magnet for controversy, recently parting ways with yet another label, she has also returned with a well-received comeback single, “New Bottega.” In a profile earlier this year in The Guardian, Banks addressed how people perceive or misperceive her based on what’s online. “They feel like they can launch frivolous lawsuits and use this villainous, stupid narrative against me,” she said.
Banks’ lawyer, John Vafa, indicated in court filings that he would use his newly granted extra time to gather more evidence about allegedly “massive” discrepancies discussed in an August 4 conference call between Banks’ former lawyer, Kwatinetz’ lawyers, and auditors. According to the paperwork, Prospect Park allegedly “failed to report funds” on “inconsistent 2015 and 2020 accounting statements,” and “deducted expenses not actually paid for,” while Brooklyn Music Distribution, where prior records show Kwatinetz is a director, was “an unnecessary third-party.” Vafa is also seeking a deposition of Kwatinetz. And the filings highlight an alleged conflict of interest, asserting that a former business manager for Banks who signed off on the accounting is now a partner at the auditing firm involved in the case.
In an October 13 filing for Banks, Vafa alleges (emphasis his): “The Court should be alarmed at Plaintiff and Cross-Defendants’ [i.e., Kwatinetz and his camp’s] desperate attempts to conceal and spoil evidence in this action [i.e., the case] with desperate flailing attempts to confuse this Court with multiple inconsistent filings … One thing is clear from the flailing oppositions: Cross-Defendants did not anticipate that cross-complainants’ new counsel of record would accomplish the cumbersome task of reviewing the relevant case files obtained from the predecessor counsel [and locate the August 2023 phone call].”