A high-profile lawsuit that accused Drake of stealing the chorus of his chart-topping single “Janice STFU” has been abruptly dropped by the accuser less than two weeks after it was filed.
In a court filing on Tuesday (Oct. 27) obtained by Billboard, attorneys for Aviel Calev Hirschfield moved to voluntarily dismiss the stunning case, which claimed the smash hit Iceman track “shamelessly” copies an unpublished demo he allegedly sent to the song’s producers.
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No explanation was given in court filings, and the case was only dropped “without prejudice,” meaning Hirschfield could refile it at some point in the future. Neither his attorneys nor Drake’s reps immediately returned requests for comment.
The move came after Drake vehemently denied the accusations, calling them a “manufactured and baseless attempt to exploit Drake’s name.” Court documents show that the star’s reps believe Hirschfield fabricated evidence to support his claims.
“Let us be absolutely clear: These allegations are categorically, unequivocally and completely denied,” his reps wrote at the time. “There is not one iota of truth to these accusations, and we reject every attempt to portray these claims as established facts.”
The lawsuit, filed Oct. 16, was a big deal because “Janice STFU” was a big deal, spending two weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 and 20 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard‘s Hot Rap Songs tally, his longest-running reign on that chart.
It was also an unusually egregious claim of infringement. Where some lawsuits claim a song merely sounds similar, Hirschfield’s case claimed that he had hard proof he had written eight lines of lyrics that appeared verbatim in Drake’s song. He claimed Drake’s track chorus was “literally identical” to his — “word-for-word, note-for-note, beat-by-beat, the exact same chorus.”
But just 11 days after those claims were filed, they have now been dismissed.
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