Jermaine Dupri filed a federal lawsuit against Sony Music Entertainment on Tuesday (July 7) in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, accusing the label of a “systemic pattern” of using “contemptuous accounting practices” to underpay royalties to him and his So So Def Recordings imprint across a 32-year business relationship. The complaint, filed by Dupri, So So Def Recordings, and So So Def Productions, seeks at least $18 million in damages, more than $10 million of which is claimed as interest on unpaid royalties, plus attorneys’ fees and any additional relief the court sees fit to grant. A jury trial has been demanded. Sony has not yet publicly responded to the filing.
The scope of the alleged underpayment is broad. Dupri’s complaint names royalties tied to Mariah Carey, Usher, Kris Kross, Xscape, Da Brat, Jagged Edge, Bow Wow, J-Kwon, and Bone Crusher, covering recording agreements and production deals dating as far back as May 1992. The allegations were not generated through routine auditing. According to the complaint, Dupri first began to suspect in 2023 that he had not been paid in full, prompting a formal desk audit by accounting firm Gelfand, Rennert and Feldman in 2025 that uncovered the alleged irregularities. “SME knew that it was violating the contracts with the Plaintiffs and never attempted to disclose its contemptuous accounting practices to the Plaintiffs,” the complaint states.
The most pointed specific allegation concerns Kris Kross. The complaint claims Sony never reported producer or override royalties from the group’s first two albums, Totally Krossed Out and Da Bomb, until 2023, more than 20 years after those albums were released. Dupri’s filing states that Sony “attempted to conceal all Kris Kross royalties due Plaintiffs for over 20 years in a separate royalty accounting system unknown to Plaintiffs,” and that more than $2.2 million remains unpaid from those albums alone. Totally Krossed Out was one of the best-selling rap albums of 1992, propelled by the lead single “Jump,” which spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The allegation that royalties from that level of commercial success were hidden in a separate accounting system for two decades is the sharpest detail in a complaint full of sharp details.
The Xscape accounting raises its own distinct set of questions. The complaint claims Sony underreported more than $960,000 in producer royalties from Xscape’s debut album Hummin’ Comin’ At ‘Cha and that, as of June 2020, Sony still maintained a So So Def account balance more than $1.5 million in the red, despite both of the group’s first two albums being certified platinum. “It is unfathomable that Xscape’s royalties were insufficient to recoup the entirety of Xscape’s advances on LP1 and LP2,” the complaint states. Dupri’s team claims that account subsequently generated more than $1 million between 2020 and 2024, but So So Def received none of those payments because Sony continued applying the old negative balance. The complaint also accuses Sony of underreporting Da Brat royalties and of issuing amended royalty statements for Jagged Edge that only corrected figures going back to 2007, leaving earlier years of alleged underpayment unaddressed. The filing frames this as deliberate concealment rather than bookkeeping error.
