The music industry executive who singlehandedly helped revive Kanye West’s career after the hip-hop star’s public embrace of neo-Nazism is asking a judge to unmask an anonymous individual he claims has “weaponize[d] technology” in an effort to destroy him via “reputational warfare.”
In a complaint filed early Tuesday morning in New York State Supreme Court and obtained by The Independent, indie label head Larry Jackson takes aim at a pair of websites, larryjacksonexposed.com and gammaexposed.com, which accuse Jackson of streaming fraud, artificially juicing sales numbers and secretly paying for press coverage.
The sites refer to 45-year-old former Apple Music creative director as “Larry Scammson,” and to media company Gamma as “Scamma,” portraying Jackson as a charlatan and his technology company as a “fraudulent enterprise,” the complaint continues. They allege that Jackson and Gamma artificially inflated sales figures for West’s comeback album, Bully, through the use of “bot-generated purchases,” that Gamma “is running out of money,” and that Jackson has blown through $90 million of the $100 million he raised from investors, wasting it on private flights, personal PR, and otherwise maintaining a “grandiose lifestyle,” according to the complaint.
Jackson’s complaint argues the sites have subjected him and Gamma, the label he co-founded in March 2023, to “a new and insidious form of corporate interference and harassment, unique to the social media and artificial intelligence age, in which anonymous actors deploy bot networks to astroturf a false narrative into the public consciousness without even a semblance of truth or accountability.”
“Increasingly, musical artists and record labels have been subjected to digital stalking, harassment campaigns, and organized libelous attacks across various online platforms,” the complaint states. “Artists and labels subjected to such anonymous defamatory campaigns have suffered significant financial, reputational, and emotional harm. Enough is enough.”
Jackson contends that he now “has no choice but to fight back, not only for itself but also for its investors, business partners, employees, and artists, against those who would weaponize technology to destroy reputations and livelihoods behind a veil of anonymity.”
Gamma was started as a high-tech alternative to traditional record labels, and handles artist development, recording, distribution and marketing. In late April, Bloomberg published what the complaint describes as a “positive and factually grounded story” about Jackson and Gamma. However, the article was quickly followed by the launch of the two websites in question, along with a “coordinated social media amplification campaign” designed to impugn his character and business acumen, according to the complaint.
“The websites falsely state that Mr. Jackson ‘lied’ to Gamma’s staff about a contractual provision with Kanye West, claiming that Mr. Jackson told employees he had ‘signed an agreement that [Kanye West] would be dropped if he had any racist or antisemitic outburst’ but that ‘[w]hen his contract got uploaded to company files they found out he lied to them,’” the complaint goes on.
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Further, Jackson says the sites “falsely state” that Gamma had been “laundering” money for Mariah Carey, another one of the artists on the company’s roster, while artificially inflating her album’s first-week numbers “to make Gamma’s accounting and investor reports look healthier than they actually were.”
The sites also claim many of Gamma’s artists, including Carey and Usher, as well as Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, and French Montana, have quietly left due to their dissatisfaction with Jackson. According to the complaint, the websites were “fully formed on their launch day,” and “appear to have been built using an AI-powered content platform,” while hiding the IP address of their hosting server and anonymizing whoever is behind them.
Once they went live, a “coordinated social media amplification campaign” appeared on X, the former Twitter, with hundreds of accounts posting links to the sites, or snippets of the content on them, all within a 12-minute window, the complaint alleges.
“In addition, a Reddit account using the handle ‘Judith_Ackee’ was identified as posting identical language to that found on the websites,” the complaint states. “That account has since been banned by Reddit.”
Still, the media took notice, according to the complaint. In early May, Page Six published an article that cited LarryJacksonExposed.com, reporting that it and its companion site had been “passed around the music industry’s C-suites.”
The complaint says Jackson and Gamma hired forensic investigators in an attempt to identify the creator of the sites and the “coordinated bot network,” but that they have been unable to do so.
“Gamma therefore brings this action… to unmask the perpetrators and hold them accountable,” Jackson’s complaint states. “Gamma also brings this action to protect its artists and its staff, who are directly within the blast radius of this coordinated attack. The false statements and narratives are designed to destabilize Gamma’s relationships with its recording artists, employees, and business partners – all of whom have been subjected to reputational harm and professional uncertainty through no fault of their own.”
The complaint says the “reputational warfare” by the sites has caused “substantial harm” to, among other things, Gamma and Jackson’s reputation and goodwill in the music and entertainment industry, damage to Gamma’s business relationships, and loss of revenue, business opportunities, and competitive advantage.
“The harm is ongoing because the websites remain accessible and the defamatory content continues to be disseminated,” the complaint concludes.
Jackson is seeking compensatory damages and punitive damages in an amount to be determined at trial, attorneys’ fees and court costs, plus an injunction forcing the as-yet-to-be identified defendant to take down the sites and prohibiting them from “publishing or disseminating any further defamatory statements concerning Gamma.”
Jackson did not respond on Tuesday to a request for comment. The Independent reached out to the websites via a ‘contact’ email on the pages.
