Talib Kweli is filing a lawsuit.
The 46-year-old rapper is coming after Jezebel, claiming that they caused emotional distress and partial financial ruin due to an article from 2020 detailing his alleged “harassment campaign” against a Black woman on Twitter.
The star filed the 34-page suit on Monday (August 9) against parent company G/O Media and the piece’s author, Ashley Reese, and claimed the outlet failed to fulfill its “duty” to fully include his perspective in the story, which is still up, called: “Talib Kweli’s Harassment Campaign Shows How Unprotected Black Women Are Online and Off.”
The article explored his social media interactions involving a then-24-year-old student and activist named Maya Moody, which eventually caused Twitter to permanently suspend him from the platform.
He is asking the court to award him $300,000 in damages, plus legal fees.
“The defendant negligently breached that duty by taking all the facts that the plaintiff stated and publishing them on the articles for 11 million plus to witness as they tried every angel [sic] to prove his facts were false, then attacked everything about his career, life, age, family,” he wrote in the filing.
He claims the article cost him both nearly $1 million in revenue since its publication two years ago plus 50% of his salary, which he estimated at $600,000.
“The defendants are a women’s magazine, and Talib Kweli was the target to impose…The publications didn’t consider the reaction that would affect Talib‘s career with the attempt to harm his reputation,” his suit alleges.
“Jezebel’s article fairly reported on the controversy which led to the permanent suspension of Talib Kweli’s Twitter account. This suit, filed two years after the story was published, has no merit and the company will be seeking our attorneys fees pursuant to the protections afforded to the press to publish stories about matters of public interest like this one,” said a G/O Media spokesperson to the Daily Beast.
“Had Kweli taken issue with the veracity of any of our commentary, he surely would have sued us for libel—but the statute of limitations for libel came and went last year. And so Kweli instead claims our story resulted in a ‘negligent infliction of emotional distress,’ one so deep that he ‘went into a depression state of loss of appetite, sleeplessness, edgy, anxiety, and discomfort around certain women,’” Jezebel wrote.
Click here for more details about the lawsuit.
