Snoop Dogg, one of the defendants looking to dismiss a $107 million lawsuit filed by Lydia Harris. Photo Credit: Bruce Baker

A federal court has officially ordered a stay in Lydia Harris’ $107 million lawsuit against Snoop Dogg, Universal Music, Death Row Records, and several others.

Judge David Hittner just recently signed off on the defendants’ stay request pending the resolution of their respective dismissal pushes. We covered one of those pushes in late April, when Snoop Dogg and Death Row urged the court to toss the suit and to label the pro se plaintiff a vexatious litigant.

Long story short, Harris is the ex-wife of Death Row co-founder Michael Harris and, following Snoop Dogg’s 2022 acquisition of the label, says she’s owed big for her purported stake.

That’s despite the $107 million default judgement that a court ordered Suge Knight to pay her years back. (Knight is behind bars on a voluntary manslaughter conviction.) Per Harris, strategic bankruptcy maneuvering and asset-concealment efforts prevented her from collecting the sizable sum.

As noted, however, Snoop and his team are refuting the position in no uncertain terms. Meanwhile, attorney David Kenner, also a defendant, is himself urging the court to toss the suit for failure to state a claim – as are Universal Music, Lucian Grainge, and Jimmy Iovine in a different motion yet.

And at least as of early May, Harris was looking to bring even more defendants into the fold.

“Plaintiff now seeks leave to file a Supplemental and Amended Complaint to add the following defendants: Marion ‘Suge’ Knight, [attorney] Dermont Givens [sic], and [hip-hop label exec] Alan Grunblatt,” she wrote at the time.

“These individuals are believed to have played a central role in orchestrating fraudulent Bankruptcy fraud in addition to the contrived pretrial summary judgement filings,” proceeded Harris.

It’s against this backdrop that Judge Hittner granted the above-mentioned stay request.

Though the corresponding order doesn’t dive into the precise reasons for approval, it does note that a previously scheduled pretrial conference is on ice while the dismissal motions play out.

As things stand, we’ll have to wait and see where said motions go from here; related updates hadn’t made their way into the docket at the time of writing. Also silent on the overarching suit is Harris, who has already addressed the case in lengthy interviews.

But she doesn’t seem to have publicly weighed in as of late. Plus, her Instagram profile appears to have been set to private.

Snoop Dogg at WrestleMania XL. Photo Credit: Diego Serrano

Snoop Dogg and Death Row Records are looking to dismiss the $107 million lawsuit filed by Lydia Harris, who they say should also be barred from litigating against them moving forward.

Counsel for Snoop Dogg and the relevant label just recently made the dismissal push official. Meanwhile, Universal Music, Jimmy Iovine, and several others are likewise defendants in the pro se complaint.

We broke down that complaint when it was filed – and then once more when the presiding judge scheduled a pretrial conference – last month. Long story short, Lydia Harris (the ex-wife of Death Row co-founder Michael Harris) says she’s owed big for her purported stake in the label, which Snoop Dogg bought in 2022.

She sued Suge Knight (who allegedly pushed her out of Death Row) for similar reasons in 2002, and a court in 2005 entered a $107 million default judgement in her favor (hence the damages sought in the current action).

But Suge Knight went on to declare bankruptcy, and Team Snoop maintains that a 2008 bankruptcy settlement both resolved Lydia’s claims and prevented her from seeking relief down the line. (Lydia has seemingly confirmed receiving a $1 million “good-faith payment” from Suge Knight at some point.)

Consequently, Snoop Dogg is painting the newest suit as the latest in a series of attempts to overturn the 2008 settlement. Lydia, who hasn’t hesitated to elaborate on her position in the media, is alleging that “strategic bankruptcy filings” concealed the assets in question and prevented the settlement’s full enforcement.

Running with those ideas, Snoop Dogg and Death Row believe that Lydia’s “substantively frivolous” suit is “undeniably time-barred by the relevant statute of limitations.”

“Thus,” reads one part of the dismissal motion, “over 20 years have elapsed between the March 9, 2005 entry of judgment and the March 18, 2025 filing of Plaintiff’s Complaint, a time period which is considerably outside the one-year statute of limitations.”

Furthermore, the two mentioned defendants say the prior litigation and settlement definitively resolved the claims at hand, subsequent discovery of additional information or not.

Leaving no stone unturned, Snoop Dogg and Death Row are also accusing Lydia of failing “to adequately plead any cognizable legal claim” and of improperly serving the suit.

“Here,” the text indicates, “the proof of service filed by Plaintiff clearly shows that Plaintiff [a party to the action, of course] herself served the Complaint via certified mail. This is clearly improper and constitutes an independent ground for insufficient service.”

For these and different reasons, the court should toss the action and deem Lydia a vexatious litigant to boot, per counsel for Snoop and Death Row. The plaintiff is allegedly “a bad faith litigant” who “continued a pattern of harassment in California for years and has now shifted her harassment to a new forum in Texas,” the motion reads.

The presiding judge has scheduled an initial conference in Lydia Harris’ $107 million Death Row lawsuit against Snoop Dogg and several others. Photo Credit: Death Row

Lydia Harris is officially proceeding with her more than $100 million lawsuit against Snoop Dogg, Suge Knight, Jimmy lovine, Lucian Grainge, and others.

The presiding judge just recently put the case’s scheduling wheels in motion, after Lydia Harris (who was previously married to Death Row co-founder Michael Harris) submitted the pro se action last week.

We promptly broke down the lawsuit, the core claims of which are straightforward enough but involve all manner of decades-old details.

Turning the clock back to the 20th century for a moment, Lydia is said to have helped establish, bankroll, and run Death Row alongside her now-ex-husband, who was incarcerated at the time of the label’s founding.

Among other things, these contributions purportedly saw the two assume a material interest in the company. Fast forward to 2002, when Lydia sued Suge Knight for allegedly pushing her out of Death Row, which had, of course, exploded in popularity since its founding.

The case never went to trial, but per a 20-year-old account from CBS News, the court in 2005 ordered Knight to cough up $107 million. Knight, who’s currently incarcerated, subsequently declared bankruptcy.

Despite this bankruptcy process, Lydia in a recent interview with Bomb1st appeared to acknowledge accepting a $1 million “good-faith payment” (the interviewer’s quote, not hers) from Suge Knight in or around 2005.

In any event, $107 million is also the sizable sum Lydia is seeking from the aforementioned defendants, who per the complaint allegedly “engaged in a deliberate and coordinated scheme to obstruct justice, conceal assets, and evade liability.”

(Of course, Snoop Dogg acquired and relaunched Death Row in 2022; that same year, we provided an in-depth look at the label’s multifaceted history, including its rise, various owners, and eventual bankruptcy.)

Additionally, the private-chef plaintiff’s suit not-so-subtly points to “strategic bankruptcy filings” designed “to prevent enforcement of the [2005] judgment and shield assets from collection.”

While it remains to be seen whether Lydia will prevail in court – more on this in a moment – an initial pretrial (video) conference is now confirmed for summer.

As currently scheduled, said conference will take place on the morning of June 27th. However, Lydia in the above-highlighted interview explained in different words that if all goes according to plan, a resolution will materialize at some point before trial.

“Yeah,” she responded when asked whether her “ultimate goal is just to get them to settle” the suit.

Photo Credit: Suge Knight by Nick Leisure / CC by 2.0

Snoop Dogg, Suge Knight, Lucian Grainge, and Jimmy Iovine are all being sued for allegedly defrauding a former Death Row Records executive.

Lydia Harris filed the $107 million lawsuit in Texas on Tuesday, accusing Snoop Dogg, Suge Knight, Death Row Records, Interscope Records, and executive Jimmy Iovine of cheating her out of a lucrative judgement she had been previously granted. Harris claims she was not only a co-founder of Death Row Records, but its first vice president.

As the wife of former Death Row Records financier and convicted drug kingpin Michael “Harry-O” Harris, Lydia Harris was awarded the original $107 million judgement in 2005 following a civil trial over the couple’s role in founding the label.

But Harris is alleging that Knight and the others named hid financial records, filed fraudulent motions, and abused bankruptcy court to avoid paying her the judgement. She says she has yet to receive a single payment in the 20 years since she won the suit against Knight and other alleged co-conspirators.

Notably, Snoop was added to the lawsuit as the current owner of Death Row Records. He acquired the label in 2022 in a deal with MNRK Music Group. According to Harris, Suge Knight used “systematic misrepresentation and fraudulent telecommunications directed at the Plaintiff in Texas” in order to avoid paying her. She began her initial legal battle against Knight in 2022.

Harry-O and Lydia Harris’ dealings with Knight began in the 1980s, when the former invested $1.5 million in Death Row Records’ launch — under the expectation that the couple would retain a 50% profit share in the business.

But Knight became “increasingly distant” with Harry-O, who was serving a 28-year prison sentence for crimes including cocaine trafficking, kidnapping, and attempted murder. That led to Lydia Harris filing suit against Knight to pursue the matter on her own.

She is seeking punitive damages, the recovery of assets owed to her, and a full accounting of Death Row Records’ finances.