Lady Gaga Wins Dog-Theft Suit, Kanye Faces New Donda Case & More of the Week’s Top Legal Stories

This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.

This week: Lady Gaga defeats a lawsuit claiming she owes a $500,000 reward to a woman convicted over the 2021 gunpoint robbery of the star’s French bulldogs; Kanye West faces another lawsuit about allegations of unsafe conditions at his Donda Academy; Diddy makes new racism accusations in an unsealed version of his tequila lawsuit; and much more.

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THE BIG STORY: Lady Gaga Doesn’t Have To Pay Her Dog-Napper

When Jennifer McBride sued Lady Gaga in February, demanding that the star pay out on a $500,000 reward she’d offered for the return of her stolen French bulldogs, McBride left out one very small detail: that she herself had been convicted of a crime over the violent 2021 robbery.

McBride was one of five people charged in connection with the Feb. 2021 gunpoint dog-napping, in which Gaga’s dog walker, Ryan Fischer, was shot and nearly killed. Though she returned the dogs days after the incident and claimed she’d found them tied to a pole, police later connected McBride to the thieves and she eventually pleaded out to one count of receiving stolen property.

But in a chutzpah-laden civil lawsuit, McBride claimed that Gaga made a binding “unilateral” offer to pay the reward in return for the safe return of the dogs, citing media reports that the offer would be paid with “no questions asked.” McBride said that regardless of her role in the crime, she had simply held up her end of a valid contract.

Gaga’s attorneys begged to differ, arguing last month that it would be absurd to allow McBride to “profit from her participation in a crime” even if she had eventually returned the dogs: “The law does not allow a person to commit a crime and then profit from it,” Gaga’s lawyers wrote.

In a ruling on Monday (July 10), Judge Holly J. Fujie agreed with those arguments, dismissing the case. To find out why, go read our entire story, which contains a link to the judge’s full written ruling.

Other top stories this week…

MORE DONDA ACADEMY ACCUSATIONS – Kanye West was hit with another lawsuit about allegedly unsafe conditions at his Donda Academy, including the bizarre accusation that the school lacked windows because the embattled rapper “did not like glass.” The case came months after a separate case that claimed the rapper fed students only sushi and that he was “afraid of stairs.”

NEW CLAIMS IN DIDDY TEQUILA CASE – An unredacted version of Diddy’s lawsuit against Diageo revealed new details about his allegations that the spirits giant unfairly treated his DeLeon Tequila as a “Black brand.” Among the new accusations was a claim that Diageo developed a watermelon flavor despite Diddy’s protests about the racist history and negative connotations with watermelon in brands aimed at Black consumers.

DABABY DROPPED FROM ‘LEVITATING’ CASE – The rapper was voluntarily dismissed from a copyright lawsuit accusing him and Dua Lipa of ripping off their smash hit “Levitating” from a 1979 song called “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” and a 1980 song called “Don Diablo.” The rapper had been named because he was featured on a popular remix of Lipa’s smash hit, which spent more than a year on the Hot 100.

CHALLENGE TO TIKTOK BAN – TikTok and a group of five users asked a federal judge to block Montana from enforcing its first-in-the-nation law banning the video-sharing app from the state, warning that the law is unconstitutional and could cause irreparable harm if allowed to go into effect in January.

ARETHA FRANKLIN ESTATE BATTLE – A jury in Michigan decided that a handwritten document created by singer Aretha Franklin in 2014 and found in her couch after her 2018 death was a valid will, overriding a 2010 will that was discovered around the same time in a locked cabinet.