50 Cent loses the lawsuit incited by Sleek Audio, when 50 bailed on designing a headphone line with them and in turn reportedly stole some of their valuable data and trade secrets.
The legal issues between 50 Cent and Sleek Audio continue, and once again, 50 Cent has found himself at the loosing end. As we reported on last year,Fiddy had taken Sleek to court, suing them over a debt he claimed the company owed him (a debt of $261,000). In the end, 50 lost his case, although he blamed it on a racial bias of the judge.
Now more news has surfaced from the beef between Sleek Audio and 50 Cent, and it’s not looking good for Fif. According to Radar Online, 50 has been ordered to fork over $16.1 million to his would-be collaborators. Sleek Audio has claimed that 50, who was once going to collaborate with Sleek on his own line of headphones, stole their top-secret designs and eventually developed the line Sync by 50 with another company– but according to Sleek it had “basically the same design, mechanically” as their potential collaboration.
Sleek also sued 50 for “misappropriating trade secrets, breaching his fiduciary duty owed to Sleek, participating in a civil conspiracy, breaching his confidentiality agreement with Sleek, and being unjustly enriched.” Sleek also claimed in their suit that 50 and his assistants blatantly stole confidential information from their website, such as potential customer e-mail addresses and other data. Apparently when Sleek e-mailed 50’s team about the breach, his personal business manager Nicolee Martin wrote “[Sleek] is onto us, LOL. They emailed and called … about the data.”
50 has been ordered by a judge to pay up $11,693,247 in damages, plus $4,488,331 in attorney’s fees.
