Martin Shkreli is suing Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA over the group’s one-of-a-kind album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, accusing the rapper of wrongfully double-selling the rights to the famous record.
The move will pull RZA (Robert Diggs) into a long-running lawsuit filed against Shkreli by PleasrDAO, a digital art collective that paid $4 million to buy the album from prosecutors after the pharma exec forfeited it following his securities fraud convictions.
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In a countersuit filed Monday (Feb. 2), Shkreli sought to pin some of the blame for that dispute on RZA, claiming that the rapper, along with Wu-Tang producer Cilvaringz (Tarik Azzougarh), had improperly sold part of the copyrights for Shaolin to Pleasr, even though those same rights were already contractually promised to him.
“An immediate, real and justiciable controversy exists between Shkreli, PleasrDAO, and the Wu-Tang defendants with respect to the ownership of this future interest,” Shkreli’s lawyers write, calling it a “duplicate sale.”
A spokesman for RZA did not immediately return a request for comment.
In a statement, Pleasr’s attorney, Steven Cooper, sharply criticized the latest filing: “Mr. Shkreli’s approach throughout has been to distract and delay with actions that the Court has consistently and strenuously rejected. These Counterclaims will meet the same fate.”
One of hip-hop’s most legendary secrets, Shaolin was published just once, on a CD secured in an engraved nickel and silver box. It came with bizarre legal stipulations, including that it couldn’t be released to the general public until 2103.
Shkreli bought the album at auction in 2015, shortly before he became the infamous “Pharma Bro” who spiked the price of AIDS drugs. But after he was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, he forfeited it to prosecutors to help pay a huge restitution sentence.
Pleasr bought Shaolin from the government in 2021 for $4 million, while in 2024, the group says, it acquired copyrights and other rights for another $750,000. The group has spent the last few years trying to monetize it, playing it at private events and selling extremely limited access via blockchain offerings.
In 2024, Pleasr sued Shkreli in federal court after he made threats to release the album on the internet, warning such a leak would destroy the asset it had purchased. And last month, a federal judge said Pleasr’s case could move ahead toward trial, ruling that the rare album might qualify as a “trade secret” that Shkreli had essentially stolen.
But in his counterclaims on Monday, Shkreli pushed back on those trade secret allegations, pointing out that the company itself had shared parts of Shaolin with the public, including via a sale of NFTs: “PleasrDAO did not buy and has never owned a ‘secret’ musical work,” the complaint reads.
Skreli also leveled the new accusations at RZA and Cilvaringz, from whom he purchased the album in the first place. Shkreli says that 2015 deal gave him 50 percent of the copyright to the album immediately and promised him the other 50 percent later — 88 years later, to be precise. Instead, Wu-Tang sold “a total of 150%” of the rights to the album, he claims.
“On a date 88 years after its execution, the Wu-Tang Defendants are obligated to transfer the remaining 50% of the copyrights to Shkreli,” his lawyers write. “Now, PleasrDAO has alleged that it purchased this same interest from the Wu-Tang defendants.”
In his statement to Billboard, Pleasr’s attorney Cooper called those claims “untimely and “non-cognizable.” He said that Shkreli could not have retained those contractual rights “when he was under a court order to forfeit all of his rights in his criminal prosecution.”