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Cardi B has filed a countersuit against her former manager Shaft, who sued her for $10 million back in April for cutting him off after he made her a star. As TMZ points out, she is suing him for $15 million, claiming he was trying to control her career and personal life, including her relationship with Offset.
She claims the deal she had with Shaft was too one-sided: court documents show Shaft had a 20 percent commission and attempted to score 50 percent of her Sony music publishing deal on top of that. She further claims Shaft put “barriers between her and people close to her in an effort to maintain complete control over her.” This included dictating “who she should and should not see romantically.”
According to court documents obtained by Complex, Cardi’s formal counterclaims against Shaft include the following: breach of contract for both their management agreement and a separate recording agreement, as well as breach of fiduciary duty.
Cardi’s claim focuses on the fact that as her manager, Shaft had a legal fiduciary duty to her—in other words, he needed to keep her best interests in mind, particularly financial ones. According to the rapper, he failed to do so and instead persuaded her to take actions that would benefit him at her expense.
Cardi claims Shaft worked to become the only person in her circle. He pushed away an early friend and manager who at first worked alongside Shaft, forcing her to pick him against her will. They started working together in late 2014, but only signed a formal agreement in March 2015, and she accepted a 20 percent commission at that time because she trusted him and he assured her the agreement was “fair and standard.”
The contract also included a term that entitled Shaft to royalties for ten years even after he ended working with her. The contract stipulated that he would be her business manager, resulting in Shaft paying himself his own commission. Shaft also pressured her to sign an exclusive recording agreement with KSR, which is owned by Shaft himself. This contract created a conflict of interest and allowed Shaft to "double-dip" into Cardi's earnings.
Furthermore, the suit also claims he did not have her best interests at heart when it came to her deal with Atlantic Records, particularly because that contract stipulated that she would receive only 50 percent of the record royalties paid by the label. The suit claims that by the end of 2017, Cardi had “determined that Shaft had betrayed the trust she had placed in him.”
Complex has reached out to a rep for Shaft for comment.
