Universal Music Group is firing back at Drake, responding to the rapper’s call to reinstate his defamation lawsuit over Kendrick Lamar’s Drake diss song “Not Like Us.”
According to a report in Digital Music News published on March 27, Universal Music Group responded to Drake’s appeal, saying that reinstating Drizzy’s defamation lawsuit would “severely harm” the art of hip-hop because he was frustrated by losing the rap battle with Kendrick Lamar. In the lawsuit, UMG said K-Dot’s calling Drake a pedophile was part of an art form “built on exaggeration, insults and wordplay.”
Drake’s original lawsuit accused Universal Music Group, not Kendrick, of defaming him through the music giant’s release of the song, which called him a “certified pedophile,” which Drizzi claimed led millions of people to truly believe he was a pedophile. However, a judge dismissed the lawsuit in October 2025, ruling that the Compton rapper’s lyrics were “non-actionable opinions,” meaning they were not statements of fact.
In UMG’s latest filing, the music group argued that Kendrick’s “pedophilic” lyrics were in response to allegations from Drake that K-Dot allegedly assaulted his wife and was not the biological father of one of his children. They added that the OVO Sound leader’s defamation lawsuit also had no weight in a broader legal sense.
“‘Not Like Us’ belongs to a genre characterized by inflammatory putdowns, name-calling, fiery rhetoric, vulgarity and exaggeration,” UMG’s lawyers reportedly wrote in the filing. “Drake’s attempts to remove the words he now dislikes from their immediate and broader context are not supported by governing law.”
The appeals court plans to hear arguments in the case in the coming months, with a ruling expected next year.
XXL has reached out to Universal Music Group for comment.
