Iggy Azalea isn’t above resorting to lawsuits to protect her “Fancy” legacy as evidenced by some recently filed court documents. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the successful Australian rapper is taking her ex-boyfriend, former manager, and purported sex tape partner — all the same person — to court for both releasing her early music and also allegedly forging a contract featuring the signature of one Amethyst Amelia Kelly.
Here’s the nuts and bolts of the situation: last week, details about a possible Iggy sex tape came to light, which she instantly denied, but then half un-denied. A day later, the man at the center of the sex tape scandal, Jefe Wine (by birth, Maurice Williams), unearthed a contract that Iggy had apparently signed giving him the rights to all recordings, including video, she’d made while he managed her career in 2007.
In today’s lawsuit, Azalea purports that Wine paid for an apartment for her when she was a 17-year-old Australian kid living in Texas — hence, underage — trying to break into the industry, but he failed to disclose that he was also married with children at the time. Then, according to the lawsuit:
Williams followed Azalea when she moved to Atlanta in 2009, according to the lawsuit, and he moved into her house. Around that time, “Williams downloaded the entire contents of Azalea’s personal computer,” including unreleased master recordings.
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That’s not the most normal of behavior by any means, but things get weirder. In July, Wine/Williams — whose also spelled his handle as “Hefe” and has gone by Wine-O and Nuwine — announced that he’d be releasing an album of early-days Iggy music, recorded during his management, called Inizio. That EP was released in bits and chunks to digital retailers in August, at which point her label filed cease-and-desist letters, which led to the deletion of Inizio.
Onto the sex tape piece of the puzzle, though. Azalea now claims the contract Wine claims she signed is a forgery, according to her lawsuit. That doesn’t mean she’s denied the existence of a tape, but it does mean it may never legally see the light of day. In terms of how the document might’ve been forged, her team offers the following:
The Forged Agreement contains tell-tale signs that it is not genuine. For example, it includes mismatched fonts on the signature page, paragraph numbers out of sequence, a signature line for ‘Wine Enterprises, inc.’ (rather than for an authorized agent), and provides, as an address for legal notices, the contact information of an attorney who had no prior knowledge of the Forged Agreement.
The closest that Iggy and her lawyers come to actually addressing the veracity of a tape comes later in the suit, when the phrasing “promotional videos featuring an impersonator of Azalea” comes into play.
