The musician is on trial for having attacked his historic manager in 2022, whom he accuses of having defrauded him.
Rap, big money and fighting: the Melun court (Seine-et-Marne) judged rapper Koba LaD on Thursday for the kidnapping and beating in 2022 of his historic manager, whom the musician accuses of having defrauded him. In a tense and packed room, where relatives and fans of the rapper rub shoulders with a heavy police deployment, the 24-year-old singer from Évry (Essonne) and his three alleged accomplices are being prosecuted for having assaulted his mentor, Marvin I. said «Deuspi»in order to force him to repay money and break their contractual ties. In the middle of the evening, eight hours after the start of the trial, the hearing continued and the interrogation of the musician with fine dreadlocks had still not started.
Tall, sharp guy, Louis Vuitton down jacket on his shoulders, the victim, Marvin I., concedes with lip service to the bar “some disputes which have been resolved” with his “little brother” from the city of Parc aux Lièvres, whose breakthrough in rap since 2018 he has supported. “They thought I was going to come after them. It’s nonsense”affirms «Deuspi»hardly talkative, subject of a complaint from Koba LaD for suspicion of embezzlement of hundreds of thousands of euros from the income from his music. The investigation into this aspect is still ongoing. According to the manager’s account, upon returning from a showcase in a club in Lille, he was taken in the early morning of April 18, 2022 by members of Koba LaD’s entourage, to an abandoned warehouse in Essonne. There he was beaten and lost consciousness.
The multi-convicted accused
When he regains consciousness, he finds himself with a group of «six-sept» people in front of the home of his partner Sarah B. in Vert-Saint-Denis, a town in the agglomeration of Melun (Seine-et-Marne). Inside, his partner and his little brother are sequestered. For several hours, violence rained down on «Deuspi». “He starts convulsing, shaking. He was bleeding, his head was starting to double or even triple in size.”describes in a quavering voice his companion Sarah B., questioned for two hours on the stand by defense lawyers. They said “he has to sign, he has to sign”. They wanted Mr. I. to sign a breach of contract, relates the young woman, on the verge of tears.
Since becoming a civil party in this case, this childhood friend of Koba LaD says she has been regularly threatened, going so far as to find a cat with its throat slit in her parking space, and having had to move twice. As soon as his testimony was completed, the police escorted him from the court through a back door. Gold-rimmed glasses and smoked lenses on their noses, their ears pierced with a golden ring, Koba LaD’s co-defendants denounce the facts “totally false” and deny it outright. In the detainee box, due to his placement in pre-trial detention in September for manslaughter in Val-de-Marne, the musician with three certified platinum albums regularly displays a smirk, laughs with part of the room at the protrusions of his lawyers.
Koba LaD’s criminal record is as extensive as his young musical career. In addition to this case of kidnapping and the manslaughter of September, he was sentenced this fall in Paris to two years in prison, one of which was for violence in a nightclub. In 2020, he received a three-month suspended prison sentence in Marseille for a car accident after which he fled.
