Suge Knight, the former rap mogul currently serving a 28-year prison sentence for the death of label owner Terry Carter, got some more bad news from a judge, the Los Angeles Times recently reported. After having voided a 2005 judgment that Knight would pay out $107 million to former Death Row associate Lydia Harris back in September of last year, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David Sotelo has reinstated the judgment, putting Knight back on the hook for the money.
Sotelo first reinstated the judgment back in December, and in his most recent ruling said the matter has now been closed as far as he's concerned. He described it as "a very old case with big names and big numbers," which is certainly true, since Harris's allegations against Knight go all the way back to 1989, when she and her husband Michael Harris were investors in the very early days of Death Row Records. When the label became successful, Harris alleged, she and her husband were forced out, leaving her to pursue what she claimed she was owed in court.
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Somewhat unusually, it was Harris herself who instigated the initial voiding of the ruling in September 2019, after she raised significant issues with the case and her attorneys' practices in securing it. The following month, Harris was seen with a new attorney, holding a press conference explaining her position that the judgment should be voided. But her old attorneys at the firm of Wasserman, Comden & Casselman alleged that it was all part of a scheme to deny their firm their agreed upon 40 percent of the ruling, contingent upon a secret, private settlement between Knight and Harris. There were also some discrepancies regarding whether Knight had already paid Harris any of the money, since in the October press conference it was claimed that she hadn't collected any, while in the law firm's suit against Harris's new attorney it was alleged she had already collected around $1 million from Knight.
Clearly it's been a complex case, but now the ruling is back on the books, which means that if there was such a scheme, it failed. And Knight is back to owing more than $100 million to Harris, as well as her old attorneys at Wasserman, Comden & Casselman.
