A long-running lawsuit against Moneybagg Yo and Roc Nation made headlines this week despite having first been filed way back in 2019, thanks to a combination of scheduling changes, attorney moves, and a plaintiff uninterested in press attention.
What’s notable about the case isn’t the substance of it: that a woman named Sherry Jackson-Floyd claims she managed the rapper for years, for no money but with the promise of future returns once he hit it big, only to have him poached by Roc Nation, while she ended up with nothing. The early-career manager (allegedly) being dumped for a big-time power player is a story as old as the music business itself.
Instead, what’s interesting about the case is what Jackson-Floyd says she did as personal and business manager, and why. Her complaint lays this out in detail, and it tells us a lot about the fake-it-’til-you-make-it nature of hip-hop, and the entertainment industry in general.
All of the behavior described below is alleged. Complex has reached out to Moneybagg Yo’s attorney with questions about the claims, but he did not respond.
What is Moneybagg Yo being accused of?
According to the complaint, when Jackson-Floyd first met Moneybagg Yo sometime in very late 2015 or early 2016, he was making between $1,500-$2,500 per performance. She describes the rapper as “marginally successful” at that point, and prone to get into trouble.
Towards the end of 2016, right after he signed with Yo Gotti’s CMG label, Jackson-Floyd says their relationship deepened, and she became both his personal and business manager.
It’s at this point that Jackson-Floyd says she realizes two things. One: her new client doesn’t have enough money to pay her. In fact, she says his finances were a mess and his credit was terrible. And two: he needed to appear to be a “hot, up-and-coming rap star” who lived “a lifestyle filled with luxury” — whether or not he actually was.
Jackson-Floyd’s complaint is very open about this.
“Plaintiff and [Moneybagg Yo] began discussions about ways to ‘upgrade’ the ‘Moneybagg Yo’ brand,” the complaint says. “The idea was to generate the public perception that ‘Moneybagg Yo’ was wildly successful, utilizing fancy cars, flashy jewelry, and other means of demonstrating a lifestyle filled with luxury. The upgraded lifestyle would then be promoted through social media, garnering attention and countless followers (and fans) along the way.”
As part of this effort, Jackson-Floyd says she used $125,000 of her own money to put a down payment on a 2015 Rolls Royce Wraith for her artist, and used her personal credit to finance the rest of the $375,000 purchase price.
“The Rolls Royce Wraith was then used throughout the ‘Moneybagg Yo’ social media marketing campaign to further the image of a successful brand,” she says in the lawsuit.
The car payment was just the beginning, Jackson-Floyd says. She claims that she added the rapper as an authorized user on her no-credit-limit American Express card, and that she “extended her personal credit” so he could get flashy jewelry. In total, she claims that, between cash and credit, she spent nearly $2 million on the rapper.
What comes across in the complaint is Jackson-Floyd’s awareness that her client had to appear to be successful. This need extended even to his four baby mothers. She says that all of them needed to have “nice furnished homes, late model vehicles, food and clothing, and other amenities to live an upscale lifestyle” — money demands that were so intense that she says she didn’t take a salary despite the fact that, by this point in 2017, her artist was bringing in several million dollars a year.
Faking it until you make it
The calculus, Jackson-Floyd says, is simple: an artist like Moneybagg Yo driving around in a Rolls Royce, or showing off fancy jewelry, or keeping multiple women in the high life — in essence, promoting “a lifestyle of luxury and success” — brings attention. That attention translates into fans and followers, and eventually, hopefully, into money. But along the way, the capital to purchase that showy lifestyle needs to come from somewhere.
Faking it until you make it, of course, is not unique to hip-hop. You can see it everywhere. For a rapper, it (allegedly) takes the form of needing a Rolls and fancy jewelry in order to get the kind of success that will eventually allow you to afford a Rolls and fancy jewelry. For an actor, it can be spending eight times your salary in the hopes of garnering enough attention to nab an Oscar nomination. For an aspiring influencer, it might be making fake five- and six-figure bets online in order to get the clout necessary to be able to one day make real ones.
Of course, success shouldn’t be dependent on convincing people that you’re already successful. But that’s the world we’re in — one in which every person with an Instagram account is now a de facto curator of their own life, putting a highlights-only, Facetuned version of reality out for public consumption. One in which, rather than relying on your own singing voice, you use a computer plug-in to replace it. One in which the online casino itself (reportedly) helps you win big — if you can get a lot of people to watch you do it.
Appearances, in other words, trump reality — painful pun about our gaudy surface-loving President intended. But just because Donald Tump is stuck in the Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous-besotted 1980s doesn’t mean that everyone else has to be. Artists, influencers, and the like becoming less devoted to showing off that lifestyle, and fans becoming less impressed by it, is the only way out of the need to make assets appear out of nowhere — a need that leads to deception, corruption, overextension, and, at least according to Sherry Jackson-Floyd, ruined credit and scuttled career prospects for the folks actually funding the illusion.
Illusion has always been a part of show business. But the pressure to show off the perfect relationship/teeth/house/lifestyle is now no longer limited to 1930s Hollywood actors in exploitative studio contracts.
