He may have quashed his beef with Meek Mill, but Drake is now in another battle with a woman who once claimed that he’d gotten her pregnant.
Drake says that, in addition to this baby scam, this woman made false rape allegations against him and demanded that he buy her silence.
He is suing her for extortion and for defamation.
According to court documents filed by Drake’s team and obtained by TMZ, Drake met Layla Lace at one of his concerts in early 2017.
Specifically, he met the curvaceous Instagram model while he was on his Boy Meets World Tour in Manchester, England.
In February of 2017, Drake says that he and Layla had a consensual hookup.
The sexual activity is said to have taken place in his hotel room.
According to Drake’s team, “Layla also voluntarily and seemingly happily performed oral sex.”
Drake’s attorney, celebrity lawyer Larry Stein, says that Layla was fine with the hookup — but enraged when Drake left it at that.
Apparently, she had been hoping that Drake would take her on tour with him, and did not take it well when he did not.
Though Drake and Layla continued to text, evidence contained within the lawsuit shows that Layla was more demanding of Drake’s attention.
Documents claim that Layla began to imagine a relationship beyond a hookup and flirtatious texts — that she came to believe that the two of them were dating.
That, the lawsuit says, was a factor when she claimed in April of 2017 that Drake had gotten her pregnant and then ghosted her.
Things got worse from there.
Drake’s team alleges that, when Layla was unable to get anything out of him or produce any evidence of an actual pregnancy or child, she changed tactics.
It was then that Layla allegedly accused Drake of rape — which was investigated by police and then cleared.
While police failing to find evidence of sexual assault is not the same thing as proving that it never happened, Drake’s team has that text messaging history.
With those text messages as evidence demonstrating Layla’s desperation to see him, they hope to prove defamation.
Sexual assault allegations should always be taken seriously, in part because the number of false reports are dwarfed by real ones, which are in turn dwarfed by the number of survivors who never come forward.
But that does not mean that there are never false reports. While it’s rare for a jilted ex to go to such extremes, it sounds like Layla was not even an ex.
Based upon these documents, it sounds like Layla was a hookup with whom Drake later flirted in text messages before they became too much.
Unless there is more to this story that we’re not seeing, it sounds like she may have become a stalker.
Not all stalkers are deranged fans. Some stalkers imagine an elaborate relationship with a celebrity, and then become enraged when the celebrity does not share their delusion.
Drake says that, when the sexual assault claim fell through, she tried to demand money to keep her from going public.
That said, so far, we have not heard Layla’s team’s side of the story.
We know that Drake fathered one secret love child in the past. Let’s not pretend that he isn’t capable of being shady.
But if she really did try to extort money and make false claims about Drake in the process, he may have a very solid case for defamation and extortion.
We’ll be sure to keep an eye on this case as it develops.