Drake’s legal team filed a reply brief on Friday (April 17) at the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, sharpening their argument that a federal judge improperly dismissed the rapper’s defamation lawsuit over Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us.
The brief targets UMG Recordings, with Drake’s lawyers arguing that the judge’s handling of the case amounts to ‘reversible error,’ pointing to her reliance on materials outside the complaint.
The reply brief follows two amicus briefs filed earlier this month backing UMG — one from Yale Law School’s Floyd Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression, and another from a group of legal scholars and social scientists. Drake’s lawyers dismiss the Yale brief’s “consent” argument — which likened Drake to a boxer, who challenged a champion to a fight, and then sued for battery — as “imaginative,” noting that consent is an affirmative defense UMG never raised.
They also push back on amici’s warnings that allowing Drake’s case to proceed would threaten the future of rap, calling that “fearmongering” and arguing that existing defamation and First Amendment protections already safeguard artistic expression.
Drake’s legal team at Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP wrote in the latest reply brief, which you can read here: “[T]he District Court relied heavily on matters outside the pleadings, weighed the evidence, made adverse factual findings contradicting well-pleaded facts, and improperly drew inferences against Drake.”
“UMG repeats the Court’s errors, largely glossing over the allegations in the Amended Complaint and focusing instead on its own version of the ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ from outside the pleadings.”
They added: “The District Court failed to abide by those bedrock principles. At a minimum, it was required to convert UMG’s motion to dismiss into one for summary judgment… But it failed to do that too.”
They argued that Drake never had the chance to contest the evidence and present what he had found in the early stages of discovery.
Drake originally filed the lawsuit in January 2025, roughly eight months after Not Like Us dropped, alleging that UMG knowingly published and promoted the song despite its lyrical content being false and defamatory.
Judge Vargas dismissed Drake’s lawsuit in October 2025, ruling that Kendrick Lamar’s diss track Not Like Us constitutes protected opinion rather than actionable defamation.
Drake appealed the dismissal in January 2026, arguing that “The District Court Created a Dangerous Categorical Rule that rap diss tracks can never be actionable.”
UMG filed its own response brief late last month, arguing that Drake’s case fails because “he seeks to strip words from their context and deem them actionable defamation.” That brief also argued that Drake had “goaded” Lamar into writing the lyrics he’s now suing over, and that rap diss tracks “signal — if not shout — opinion not fact.”
“The District Court dismissed Drake’s defamation claim based solely on its determination that the Recording, Video, and Image contained statements of opinion rather than actionable statements of fact.”
Drake’s reply brief
Drake’s brief contends that Judge Vargas made an error by considering the song only within the context of the entire rap battle between Drake and Kendrick Lamar.
In the latest reply brief, Drake’s lawyers said the judge drew on materials never cited in the complaint such as a separate Drake track called Taylor Made Freestyle that was only available for one week and “whose contested lyrics are not even in Drake’s voice.”
Drake’s team wrote that the “Court found that a reasonable listener would have understood the Recording’s pedophilia allegations as a ‘callback’ to Taylor Made Freestyle. The reliance on materials outside the pleadings deprived Drake of the opportunity to rebut this counterfactual assertion.”
They added: “The Court precluded Drake from rebutting its (and UMG’s) unreasonable inferences.”
The brief also focuses on who was listening to Not Like Us. The song was streamed about 96 million times in its first week, which according to Drake’s team, “pales in comparison to the 3.65 billion ‘total global views’ of the Super Bowl performance” where Lamar performed the track to an audience of 133.5 million viewers.
Drake’s brief also challenges the argument that rap diss tracks are shielded from defamation claims.
“The District Court dismissed Drake’s defamation claim based solely on its determination that the Recording, Video, and Image contained statements of opinion rather than actionable statements of fact,” according to the reply brief.
Drake’s lawyers said the court “committed multiple errors” such as misapplying judicial notice to draw inferences against Drake, replacing the reasonable listener with a rap aficionado, and ignoring the broader social context, among others.
The rapper’s lawyers asked the Second Circuit to reverse the dismissal.Music Business Worldwide
