EXCLUSIVE: Childish Gambino Spanks Rival Rapper For Almost $300K Over “This Is America” Beef

Childish Gambino’s legal team just got paid nearly $300,000 after Kidd Wes lost his appeal over “This Is America.”

Childish Gambino just locked in another legal victory that’s gonna cost his accuser serious money.

A federal appeals court upheld a $286,475 attorney fee bill against rapper Kidd Wes, who tried to claim that “This Is America” was a bite of his 2016 track “Made in America.”

An appeals panel wasn’t having it.

The issues started back in 2021 when Kidd Wes filed suit, three years after “This Is America” went viral and swept the Grammys. That timing alone made the courts side-eye the whole situation.

The judge said the timing of the lawsuit, filed in 2021, years after “This Is America” went viral, swept the Grammys, and generated major commercial success, made the whole thing look “opportunistic.”

In the court’s words, Kidd Wes’s claim was “without merit on its face,” and a fee award was necessary to discourage similarly weak cases while not scaring off “close or novel” copyright claims.

The real problem? Kidd Wes never registered a copyright for the musical composition he said was stolen. That’s a basic requirement under copyright law, and it killed his case before it even got going.

The district court originally asked for $934,000 in legal fees, but the judge knocked it down to $286,000, saying that amount would still deter weak lawsuits without crushing an individual artist financially.

Kidd Wes appealed, arguing the fee was too much. The Second Circuit wasn’t moved.

The court emphasized that Kidd Wes had been warned about the registration problem but kept pushing anyway.

The court’s message was simple: don’t file lawsuits unless you have taken all the proper steps to defend your claim.

Kidd Wes is now on the hook for nearly $300,000 to the team behind one of the biggest songs of the decade.

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