Six years after DMX’s death, his estate is quietly battling with a longtime friend and collaborator — over both unreleased recordings and his claim to be a co-writer of DMX’s breakout hit.
DJ Superior (Michael Murray), DMX’s friend from his early days in Yonkers, says he owns many items tied to the star, including VHS videos, handwritten lyric sheets and cassette tapes of never-released tracks. He tried to auction some of them last year, and now he wants to release music he says he co-owns.
But in a series of cease-and-desist letters over the past year, obtained by Billboard, attorneys for the DMX estate’s executors have said that’s very much a no-go. They say the physical items actually belong to the estate, and that a streaming release of the music would be grounds for a copyright lawsuit.
“The estate will seek all available relief against Mr. Murray and all others acting in concert with him in connection with this release and any and all other releases of DMX’s work that the estate has not authorized,” lawyers for the DMX estate wrote in a June letter.
In a statement to Billboard, estate manager Ashley Austin reiterated those warnings, saying they had made “substantial good faith efforts” to find a resolution to the dispute but that Superior has been “unreasonable” and that the estate is tasked with “protecting DMX’s legacy.”
“Let us be crystal clear: any unreleased DMX material cannot be commercially distributed, published, released or licensed without the estate’s consent,” Austin said. “Mr. Murray and any other party attempting to exploit such material risks legal action.”
Superior’s manager, Jonah Levine, tells Billboard they’re still eager to reach a deal with the estate to release the music, calling it “a piece of history” that ought to be heard by fans: “Our ultimate goal is not to make money, is not peddling our wares. Our goal is to allow Superior’s work to be put out in public.”
DMX (Earl Simmons) soared to stardom in the 1990s with Billboard Hot 100 hits “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem,” “Party Up (Up In Here)” and “What These Bitches Want.” Known for his unusual flow and aggressive delivery, he’s one of the most influential MCs in hip-hop history. He placed 16 different tracks in the Hot 100, and was the first-ever artist to have their first five albums debut atop the Billboard 200.
Superior says he was there for much of DMX’s rise in the late 1980s and early 1990s, recording “street tapes” with the future star in his Yonkers apartment that they would then sell from the trunks of cars. He says he helped write songs that later became hits, rapped verses on the tapes, and produced many of the tracks on equipment he owned.
The pair seemingly had little to no professional relationship during the peak of the rapper’s career, but Superior claims he was in the hospital room in April 2021 on the night DMX died following a heart attack: “I was there in the beginning and at the end,” he said in a 2021 interview. “I loved him.”
In the years since his death, DMX’s estate has been run by his ex-fiancée Desiree Lindstrom and his daughter Sasha Simmons (Tashera Simmons, his wife of 16 years before a 2016 divorce, claimed she owned half his IP rights, but a judge rejected that argument last year.) The estate’s affairs are managed by Artist Legacy Group, Austin’s company that oversees rights licensing for late stars like Sam Cooke, Dean Martin and Iggy Pop.
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Three years after DMX’s death, Superior produced a July 2024 live show in Los Angeles called “The Rise of Dark Man X,” where fans could experience “unreleased material recounting the humble beginnings of DMX.” At the bottom of the webpage, a warning read: “Unauthorized show not endorsed by DMX estate. Content is solely that of its creators.”
Weeks before that event, Superior had gotten a message from Jessica Wood, a lawyer at the law firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips, on behalf of DMX’s estate executors. The note was cordial by the standards of such letters, but insisted that the DJ disclose what materials he had in his possession and agree not to violate the estate’s intellectual property rights.
“We can assure you that our client, the estate, welcomes your enthusiasm for DMX and the DMX franchise,” Wood wrote. “Further, as a friend of DMX, we are certain that you can understand that the estate must protect the integrity of [DMX’s copyrights and trademarks] so that future generations of fans can enjoy them as well.”
Things got much less friendly in 2025, when Superior tried to auction off DMX-linked items, including lyrics sheets and tapes of unreleased tracks. In a May 2025 letter to the auctioneer, the estate warned that the DJ had “never owned the physical materials” and that DMX had instead only “entrusted” them to him for safekeeping.
In another letter days later, the estate sharply criticized the auction house after it apparently defended the planned sale by suggesting that the estate simply buy back the items. Robert A. Jacobs, another attorney at Manatt and a veteran music litigator, called that suggestion “offensive.”
“That [the auctioneer] and [Superior] seek to auction off important pieces of DMX’s legacy that do not belong to them just to make a buck is problematic enough,” Jacobs wrote. “That [the auctioneer] and [Superior] would do so while asking the Estate to fund their profiteering is shameful.”
The DJ quickly backed down. In a response a day later, the auctioneer said Superior had pulled the items from auction and wanted to “negotiate a mutually acceptable and beneficial settlement.” But the talks never went anywhere, with the two sides far apart on who owned what and how to split proceeds.
Those negotiations started with a June 2025 settlement proposal, reviewed by Billboard, in which Superior offered to hand over all unreleased recordings to the estate to be digitized and released, with any profits being split 80-20 in favor of the estate. The estate then countered that he would need to explicitly waive any claim to copyright ownership and instead take a 90-10 split on profits.
As for the physical memorabilia, Superior offered an 15-85 split in his favor from any auction proceeds, citing the fact that he “clearly owns” the actual tapes and that “without his efforts… the cassettes would not exist.” The estate countered with a 75-25 in its favor, arguing that “virtually the entire value and market appeal of the cassettes are attributable to DMX.” And it outright refused to let him auction handwritten lyrics sheets.
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As the standoff dragged on this spring, Superior got a new lawyer. Daniel J. Schacht, a longtime music litigator at the firm Donahue Fitzgerald, argued in a March letter that the DJ not only did own the items he was trying to auction, but also that was the legal co-author of at least 10 DMX songs, including his breakout 1998 hit “Get At Me Dog,” which reached No. 39 on the Hot 100. That meant, Schacht wrote, that Superior could commercially exploit any of those songs as he saw fit.
“Superior respects and values Mr. Simmons’ family as well as the longtime creative relationship that existed between him and Mr. Simmons for well over 30 years,” Schacht wrote in March. “Superior made a promise to Mr. Simmons on his deathbed that he would help make sure that Mr. Simmons’ children would be taken care of. Our client remains fully committed to honoring that promise by utilizing the materials responsibly and thoughtfully.”
That prompted a blistering response. Jacobs called Schacht’s letter “the latest in a string of misguided attempts” by Superior “to leverage a fictionalized account of his role in Mr. Simmons’ work” into intellectual property rights to which he has “no plausible entitlement.” He labeled those claims “revisionist history” that the estate had already “debunked multiple times.”
“It should be lost on no one that Mr. Murray launched these efforts only after Mr. Simmons died, when Mr. Murray knew that the person best able to rebut his specious claims would not be able to do so,” Jacobs wrote.
The estate pointed to copyright law’s statute of limitations, which bars anyone from asserting a claim to co-ownership after more than three years. He also said Superior couldn’t even prove that he was a co-author in the first place, since DMX was “the driving force behind and had final say over” every song the DJ was claiming to have co-created.
The letter ended by warning Superior not to proceed with an apparently-planned debut of an unreleased song called “F That,” on streaming services. Jacobs said such a release would constitute a “clear-cut infringement of the estate’s exclusive rights.”
“The estate is prepared to honor the last proposal it made to Mr. Murray to resolve all issues,” Jacobs wrote. “In no event, however, will the estate accede to his demands or modify its proposal in any manner so that it recognizes Mr. Murray’s baseless copyright ownership claims.”
But weeks later, Schacht wrote back that the release would go ahead as planned, with any proceeds from the song simply being split 50-50: “While we broadly disagree with your characterizations of both the facts and the law, we remain optimistic that Mr. Simmons’ estate will see the value of cooperation and not embark on expensive and ultimately unsuccessful litigation.”
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In the months since, no lawsuit has been filed. But no music has been released, either. According to Superior’s manager Levine, no distributor or platform has been willing to release the music so long as the rights are clouded by the dispute with the estate.
“We can’t. We’ve tried. [Distributors and streamers] all basically say the same thing, which is you need to provide some sort of written proof signed by the estate,” Levine says. “Without the estate signing something, there’s nothing we can do.”
To hear Levine tell it, the estate is at fault for the stalemate. He says they’ve always viewed Superior as nothing more than a “hanger-on” to a famous star, and have questioned whether his materials are legitimate, even suggesting that they may have been generated by artificial intelligence.
But the estate told Billboard that the problem is driven by Superior refusing to “provide copies of, or even access to” the materials, meaning it cannot properly assess how to proceed: “Despite substantial good faith efforts to resolve this matter privately and amicably, Mr. Murray has imposed unreasonable conditions that have made a resolution impossible,” Austin said.
Levine says he and Superior are planning a new proposal to the estate in the coming weeks that will include more details, and are “willing to work with them quite literally in any capacity” to get the songs released. But the two sides still appear far apart, particularly over the DJ’s claim to have co-written DMX songs that went on to be huge hits.
That issue expands the dispute substantially — from what could be a narrow fight over historical unreleased recordings to a larger battle over credits and royalties for existing songs. “Get At Me Dog,” the biggest track that Superior claims to have helped create, has been played 16 million times on Spotify and seven million more on YouTube.
And neither side seems willing to back down. The estate says it “categorically disputes” that Superior owns any rights, and has insisted he waive ownership as a precondition to a settlement. More pointedly, it says DMX himself would disprove such claims if he was still alive: “Mr. Murray engaged in these activities only after Mr. Simmons’ passing, when Mr. Simmons was no longer able to protect or speak for his own creative legacy.”
Levine, meanwhile, confirms they believe DMX’s later hits were indeed “derivative” versions of earlier songs the DJ helped create, entitling them to co-ownership. He says they want the estate to “give Superior the credit he deserves,” and hopes they can “prove to the world Superior’s role in some of the biggest songs that X ever did.”
