Suge Knight‘s world is never not interesting. The man’s life story reads like an overheated film noir script scooped from the black-and-white days of private detectives and dropped into the middle of hip-hop’s most excess-fueled and hedonistic period. Everywhere you turn there’s urban legends of shakedowns, assaults and veiled threats and that’s before you get to the actual attempts on Knight’s life and the murder he’s been charged with.
Well, that hardboiled novel got another chapter recently when Suge Knight filed a lawsuit against Dr. Dre alleging that the rapper and mogul sent a hitman to kill him. According to TMZ, Knight claims in the suit that a shooting at 1 OAK following the 2014 VMAs and the incident that left Knight on trial for murder after running over two people can both be chalked up as attempts on his life orchestrated by Dr. Dre. Knight also claims he has a contract with Dre that entitles him to 30% of all of Dre’s entertainment earnings. This would mean Knight is owed a hefty payday from the sale of Beats to Apple for $3.2 billion. And Knight says that both incidents were Dre’s attempt to skip out on paying him.
The suit claims that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department questioned a man named “T-Money” about the 1 OAK shooting, and that he confessed to attempting to kill Knight in exchange for $50,000 from Dre. It goes on to say that Cle “Bone” Sloan — one of the men Suge ran over with his car — was paid $300,000 by Dre and Universal to kill Knight. Knight has maintained that he ran over both men while fleeing for his life.
“The lawsuit gives the proper motivation or at least explains what happened to Suge in the past year and a half,” Knight’s lawyer, Thaddeus Culpepper, told Rolling Stone. “It sets the table for real discussion as to why he would just run people over. If the idea is that he was just a crazy man and ran some people because he’s Suge Knight, no, there was a reason and we think we set it out pretty well.”
Dre’s lawyers, on the other hand, feel pretty confident that Knight isn’t going to win this case.
“Given that Dre has had zero interaction with Suge since leaving Death Row Records in 1996, we hope that Suge’s lawyer has lots of malicious prosecution insurance,” one said, when asked about the case by Rolling Stone.
