In a strongly worded lawsuit filed Friday (Jan. 23), Chad Hugo accused his longtime collaborator Pharrell Williams of extensive legal wrongdoing, including self-dealing, concealing material information, and diverting revenues owed to him. According to the complaint, Williams allegedly withheld royalties, refused to provide financial records, and engaged in what Hugo’s lawyers describe as a “systemic denial” of Hugo’s rights as a partner. The suit claims Hugo may be owed as much as $1 million from the 2017 N.E.R.D. album No One Ever Really Dies alone.

A Partnership That Publicly Still Existed

The filing follows an earlier 2024 dispute in which Hugo accused Pharrell of fraudulently attempting to secure sole control over The Neptunes name—a case that remains pending. What makes the new lawsuit notable is how far it widens the scope of the allegations: Hugo claims he repeatedly requested royalty statements, books, and records beginning in 2021, only to be met with years of incomplete disclosures and silence. Even as late as 2022, the two publicly presented themselves as collaborators and were inducted together into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

On paper, it’s a story of betrayal between childhood friends and creative partners. But it’s difficult to ignore the historical irony—because these allegations closely mirror what Kelis has been saying for years.

Kelis Said This Years Ago

In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, Kelis stated that she was never properly paid for her first two albums under The Neptunes’ Star Trak imprint. She said she was explicitly told her earnings would be split evenly—33/33/33—between herself, Chad Hugo, and Pharrell Williams. That, she claims, never happened. Instead, she says she was “blatantly lied to and tricked,” only discovering much later that she had been surviving primarily on touring income while album revenues went elsewhere.

When she raised concerns, the response she describes was simple: you signed it. Kelis has been clear about the power imbalance at play—young, inexperienced, trusting, and misled about what she was agreeing to. Her story was dismissed for years as bitterness, revisionism, or personal grievance.

Now, the same machinery—opaque accounting, withheld documents, appeals to contracts signed long ago—is being turned inward.

None of this means Hugo’s claims are invalid. If anything, they reinforce how normalized these practices have been in the industry. But it does complicate the optics. The mechanisms that harmed Kelis were not abstract. They were built, enforced, and defended by the same creative empire now fractured by them.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable conclusion: what you do to others eventually comes back to you—especially when it was never repaired, never acknowledged, and never made right.

Kelis didn’t get vindication in court. She got time.
And time, it turns out, has been the last laugh.

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