Fallen rap mogul and former Jay-Z partner Damon Dash has stashed money in a web of corporate entities to dodge paying a nearly $100,000 judgement, a new lawsuit claims.
Author Edwyna Brooks, who won a previous $300,000 copyright infringement case against Dash in 2020, filed a new suit against him in Manhattan federal court this month.
She is looking to collect a judgement Dash owes her from a failed countersuit he filed, but he’s long kept his assets hidden in a web of corporate transfers, her latest suit says.
That debt is nearly $100,000 with interest, says her lawyer, Chris Brown.
Dash and girlfriend Rachel Horn, who is also being sued, “[comingled] and [used] their companies as one entity and attempt to use the entities in an elaborate liability shifting scheme to avoid judgment debtors on behalf of themselves and their entities,” the suit claims.
Brooks’ suit was filed after Dash’s stake in Rocafella Records was sold at auction for a paltry $1 million – with the winning bidder being the state, meaning a long line of creditors are going to have to find alternative ways of getting paid.
“Mr. Dash has about $10 million in personal debt,” Brown told The Post. “If we would have been made whole from the auction, this lawsuit would not be necessary.”
In Brooks’ case, after she won her initial copyright judgement against Dash and his company, Poppington LLC, the ex-rapper allegedly tried to hide his assets by moving them to a company not named in the litigation.
“Poppington began fraudulently conveying Poppington assets” to a new corporation, The Dash Group, “to avoid Brooks’ judgement,” Brooks’ new suit claims.
“There is no doubt that Poppington and TDG are related entities and engaged in a defacto merger,” the suit alleges. “The assets of Poppington were fraudulently conveyed to TDG in order to hide them from Brooks and future judgment creditors.”
One reputed damning piece of evidence in the suit cites the fact that Dash was previously paid a significant consulting fee by Kanye West — $83,333 per month — through his Poppington company.
But the suit claims that once the “fraudulent’ merger of the businesses took place, Dash immediately began billing West through his newly created company The Dash Group, according to bank records filed with the suit that show West sent the same exact consulting fee to the fresh business.
“All of the assets of Poppington, which he used as his personal fund, all of that got transferred to The Dash Group — and Poppington is a defendant in all of these cases,” Brown said.
In the original copyright lawsuit, Brooks claimed that Dash had marketed and sold a film she made based on a female crime boss character from a book series she penned called “Mafietta.”
A representative for Dash did not respond to a Post request for comment
Read the full article here