Dame Dash’s Life Story Is Going Up for Auction to Pay His Creditors

Damon “Dame” Dash, left, and Singa B pose for a photo in 2019. Dash, the Roc-A-Fella Records co-founder, is facing the court-approved auction of his life-story rights, name, image and likeness and more than 100 hours of archival material as part of his bankruptcy case. (Photo courtesy of Singa B/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Dame Dash spent decades insisting on ownership.

Now a bankruptcy court is preparing to sell the rights to tell his story.

A Florida bankruptcy judge has approved plans to auction a package of assets tied to the Roc-A-Fella Records co-founder that includes rights to his life story, name, image and likeness, along with more than 100 hours of video footage, photographs and memorabilia.

The opening bid: $37,000.

The money won't go to Dash.

It will go toward paying his creditors.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Roberta A. Colton approved the bidding process Tuesday as part of Dash's bankruptcy case, moving forward with a sale proposed by court-appointed trustee Traci K. Stevenson.

Everlasting Films LLC has submitted the $37,000 initial bid.

Dame Dash is aggravated after seeing Loren Lorosa report on his bankruptcy pic.twitter.com/JJvfonTTSe

— 2Cool2Blog (@2Cool2Blog) August 7, 2026

Other prospective buyers have until Sept. 23 to submit competing offers. Because bids must increase by at least $10,000, another bidder would have to offer at least $47,000.

If qualifying competing bids are received, an auction is scheduled for Oct. 1. Colton is expected to consider final approval of the winning sale Oct. 27.

The unusual collection of assets goes considerably further than the right to make a conventional authorized biography.

Court filings describe rights to Dash's biography, voice, image, likeness and other identifying characteristics, as well as the ability to portray events from his life.

The package also includes more than 100 hours of video, photographs and memorabilia and rights connected to an unreleased film project involving Roc-A-Fella.

That footage could prove particularly valuable because Dash was present for one of the most consequential runs in modern hip-hop business.

Dash co-founded Roc-A-Fella Records with Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter and Kareem “Biggs” Burke in the 1990s. The label became the home of Jay-Z's rise from independent rapper to one of music's biggest stars and later released records by artists including Kanye West, Cam'ron, Beanie Sigel, Memphis Bleek and Freeway.

The company also became part of Dash's public identity as he championed entrepreneurship and ownership while expanding into fashion, film and other businesses.

The irony of that history is difficult to miss.

A man who spent years publicly preaching the importance of controlling one's work could soon have another party acquire the contractual rights to commercially tell his life story.

The proposed sale follows a long series of financial and legal problems for Dash.

He filed for bankruptcy in September 2025 after years of judgments, tax liabilities and other debts.

His once-substantial interest in Roc-A-Fella has already been sold.

Dash's one-third stake in the company was auctioned in 2024 after a federal judge ordered the sale to satisfy a judgment against him. New York state ultimately acquired the stake with a $1 million bid, with proceeds applied toward Dash's debts.

The life-rights sale would turn another part of Dash's history into an asset for creditors.

Everlasting Films, the initial bidder, would receive a $3,700 breakup fee if another buyer ultimately wins the assets under the proposed bidding terms.

Dash did not appear at Tuesday's hearing, according to Complex, and had not publicly commented on the court's latest decision as of Wednesday afternoon.

The $37,000 bid should not be confused with a final valuation of Dash's life story. It establishes the floor for a competitive sale that could produce higher offers before the Sept. 23 deadline.

What the eventual buyer could acquire, however, is unusually broad: not simply permission to make a film about a former music executive, but an archive of material from someone who was inside Roc-A-Fella during a formative period in hip-hop history.

Nearly three decades after helping build a record company around ownership and independence, Dash is watching bankruptcy court turn his own story into something that can be sold.

Cassandra Wilson, Singular Voice Who Connected Jazz, Blues and R&B, Dies at 70

Cassandra Wilson performs at the Ottawa Bluesfest in Ottawa, Ontario, on July 3, 2008. The two-time Grammy Award winner, whose rich contralto and adventurous approach brought jazz into conversation with blues, R&B, folk and other musical traditions, died Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, in her native Jackson, Mississippi. She was 70. (Photo by Scott Penner/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Cassandra Wilson, the two-time Grammy-winning singer whose unmistakable contralto carried blues, R&B, folk, country and the sounds of her native Mississippi into some of the most adventurous jazz recordings of her generation, has died. She was 70.

Wilson died Tuesday morning in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, Hinds County Coroner Jeramiah Howard confirmed. Her longtime manager, Robert Torre, announced her death Wednesday, saying Wilson died peacefully at home surrounded by family and close friends.

A cause of death was not announced.

Wilson emerged as a major voice in the 1980s and became one of jazz's most distinctive stars during the following decade, challenging expectations about both what a jazz singer should sound like and what songs belonged in a jazz repertoire.

Her breakthrough 1993 album, “Blue Light ’Til Dawn,” drew from blues, jazz, folk and popular music and included her interpretations of songs associated with Robert Johnson, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell.

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“New Moon Daughter” pushed the idea further in 1995, moving from Billie Holiday and Son House to Hank Williams, Neil Young and the Monkees without losing the musical identity holding it together.

The album earned Wilson her first Grammy Award for best jazz vocal performance.

She would win again for “Loverly,” released in 2008, and received four Grammy nominations during her career.

Wilson's reach also extended into hip-hop during a period when the genre's relationship with jazz was rapidly evolving. She appeared on “Swept Away” from the Roots' 1995 album “Do You Want More?!!!??!,” a record that helped establish the Philadelphia group's live-band approach to hip-hop.

For Wilson, crossing those boundaries was less a detour than an extension of where she came from.

Born in Jackson in 1955, she grew up listening to music that included Motown, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. Her father, Herman B. Fowlkes, was a musician, and Wilson began piano lessons at 6 before taking up other instruments.

After spending time in New Orleans, she moved to New York in the early 1980s and became associated with saxophonist Steve Coleman and the M-Base Collective, the experimental group of musicians whose ideas helped reshape contemporary jazz.

Wilson eventually moved toward the spacious, acoustic sound that became one of her signatures.

Her low, instantly identifiable voice could make familiar material sound as though it had originated somewhere else entirely.

That quality allowed Wilson to move through musical traditions that were often separated by genre labels — Delta blues, jazz standards, rock, folk, R&B and country — while keeping Mississippi at the center of her sound.

Jon Batiste, who toured with Wilson early in his career, remembered that quality Wednesday.

In a tribute posted after her death, Batiste wrote that Wilson's combination of folkloric, R&B, diasporic, experimental and popular music had a major influence on him. He said her Mississippi heritage remained present regardless of how far her music traveled stylistically.

“She was one of the first people to take me on tour around the world, the great Cassandra Wilson,” Batiste wrote.

Jackson Mayor John Horhn also paid tribute to Wilson, saying the city had lost an extraordinary native daughter and the world a singular musical voice.

Wilson's later work continued to resist easy categorization.

In 2015, she released “Coming Forth by Day,” an album honoring Billie Holiday released during the centennial of Holiday's birth. It would become Wilson's final studio album.

The National Endowment for the Arts named Wilson a Jazz Master in 2022, placing her among recipients of one of the nation's highest honors for jazz musicians.

Jury Convicts Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis of Murder Nearly 30 Years After Tupac Shakur’s Death

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, shown in a 2023 booking photo, was found guilty Monday, Aug. 31, 2026, of first-degree murder in the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur. The Las Vegas jury deliberated for less than three hours before convicting Davis, the only person ever charged in the nearly 30-year-old case. (Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department)

Nearly 30 years after Tupac Shakur was gunned down on a Las Vegas street, the only person ever charged in his killing has been convicted of murder.

A Las Vegas jury found Duane “Keffe D” Davis guilty of first-degree murder with a deadly weapon Monday, delivering the first criminal conviction in a case that spent decades as one of hip-hop’s most infamous unsolved killings.

Jurors deliberated for less than three hours.

Davis, 63, was not accused of firing the shots that killed Shakur. Prosecutors instead argued that the former South Side Compton Crips leader helped organize the retaliatory attack and provided the gun used in the shooting.

Under Nevada law, prosecutors did not have to prove Davis pulled the trigger to hold him criminally responsible for Shakur’s death.

The verdict caps a case with an unusual history: For years, authorities could not bring charges in Shakur’s killing. Then Davis began publicly telling the story himself.

His accounts in interviews, a documentary, conversations with investigators and his 2019 memoir, “Compton Street Legend,” eventually became central to the prosecution’s case against him.

Shakur was shot Sept. 7, 1996, after attending a Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Earlier that night, Shakur, Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight and others encountered Davis’ nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, inside the hotel. Surveillance video captured Shakur and members of his entourage attacking Anderson.

Prosecutors argued that the beating set a revenge plot in motion.

Davis and three other men got into a white Cadillac and went looking for Shakur and Knight, prosecutors said. They eventually found the pair in a BMW stopped near the Las Vegas Strip.

Someone inside the Cadillac opened fire.

Shakur was struck multiple times. Knight was wounded but survived.

Shakur died six days later at a Las Vegas hospital. He was 25.

Davis has acknowledged being in the Cadillac but maintained that he was not the shooter. In previous accounts, he described passing a gun toward the vehicle’s back seat.

Prosecutors used those accounts to argue that Davis was not merely a witness to the killing but an active participant in it.

During closing arguments Monday, Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal told jurors that determining who actually pulled the trigger was not necessary to determine Davis’ guilt.

The defense offered a striking counterargument: Davis could not be trusted.

Defense attorney Michael Sanft argued that Davis embellished or fabricated portions of his accounts and that prosecutors lacked physical evidence independently tying him to the murder. The defense also pointed to inconsistencies in Davis’ various versions of what happened that night.

That argument required jurors to consider whether the man who spent years publicly describing his presence in the car and his involvement in the events surrounding Shakur’s death had been telling the truth then — or was telling the truth now when he denied criminal responsibility.

The jury sided with prosecutors.

The conviction provides a courtroom resolution to a killing that became inseparable from the mythology surrounding one of rap’s most influential artists.

Shakur was already a major star when he was killed, but 1996 had pushed his career to another level. His fourth studio album, “All Eyez on Me,” had arrived in February as a sprawling double album featuring “California Love,” “How Do U Want It” and “I Ain’t Mad at Cha.”

His death also came during a turbulent period in hip-hop, amid the heavily publicized rivalry involving artists and labels associated with the East and West coasts.

For years afterward, theories about Shakur’s killing flourished while the case remained officially unresolved.

Davis increasingly inserted himself into that history.

A once-secret 2008 interview with investigators became particularly important at trial. Davis spoke to authorities while they were investigating the killing of Christopher Wallace, the rapper known as the Notorious B.I.G., who was fatally shot in Los Angeles six months after Shakur’s death.

Davis later discussed the Shakur shooting publicly, including in the 2018 documentary series “Death Row Chronicles” and in “Compton Street Legend,” published the following year.

Those public disclosures ultimately helped investigators take another look at the long-dormant case.

Las Vegas police arrested Davis in September 2023 after a grand jury indicted him on a murder charge.

By then, the three other men authorities identified as occupants of the Cadillac were dead, leaving Davis as the only person from the vehicle who could face prosecution.

Three decades after the gunfire that killed Shakur, a jury has now held him criminally responsible.

Davis faces the possibility of life in prison.