- Pras Michel sued Lauryn Hill over alleged wrongdoing, including claims she exploited his legal troubles.
- Hill strongly denied his claims, saying the lawsuit was ‘full of false claims and unwarranted attacks’.
- The lawsuit has now been voluntarily dropped, though Pras could potentially refile in the future.
Pras Michel’s lawsuit against his Fugees bandmate has officially been dropped.
The complaint, which accused Lauryn Hill of “gross mismanagement,” was voluntarily dropped this week.
In 2024, Pras sued the singer over multiple counts of alleged wrongdoing, including claims that she had exploited his ongoing legal troubles to get him to agree to a reunion tour under duress. Once those allegations were made public, Hill strongly denied his claims, saying Michel’s lawsuit was “full of false claims and unwarranted attacks.”
However, in a court filing on Wednesday, March 11, both Pras and Hill agreed that he would voluntarily drop his lawsuit, per Billboard. Neither side has commented on what led to the dismissal, though it was filed “without prejudice,” meaning that Pras could theoretically refile the same complaint against Hill at some point in the future.
Pras is set to begin his 14-year prison sentence later this month, which comes after he was convicted in 2023 on illegal foreign lobbying and conspiracy charges. The rapper is currently appealing that verdict and pleading with the court to allow him to stay free while he does so, but there’s been no update on that front just yet.
The Fugees–also comprised of Wyclef Jean–rose to fame in the 1990s before splitting up in 1998. All three had successful solo careers, but in recent years, they attempted multiple reunion tours.
Michel was hit with sweeping federal criminal charges in 2019, over accusations that he funneled money from fugitive Malaysian financier Jho Low, the mastermind of the billion-dollar 1MDB embezzlement scheme, to a lobbying campaign aimed at getting the first Trump administration to drop its investigation into Low. According to Billboard, he was also accused of secretly funneling Low’s money to Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.
In April 2023, Michel was convicted on 10 counts, including conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government, leading to his sentencing last year. He was given 14 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $64 million allegedly linked to the scheme.
In 2024, Michel sued Hill, claiming she exploited his legal bills to get him to sign onto a plan for the 2023 tour with false promise. His lawyers claimed his former bandmate took advantage of a “desperate man” who needed to pay expensive criminal lawyers, even using an advance of cash to get him to sign a deal with “onerous terms,” which he allegedly would have “easily rejected in the years before his criminal conviction.”
At the time, Hill denied Michel’s accusations, saying he left out many key facts about the dispute, one of them being that she made sure he was given a $3 million advance to pay his legal bills and that he had not yet paid that money back.
“This baseless lawsuit by Pras is full of false claims and unwarranted attacks,” Hill wrote in her response. “Despite his attacks, I am still compassionate and hope things work out for him.”
