‘You will suffer fif’: 50 Cent punished, intimidated ex-staffer, suit says

New York rapper 50 Cent launched a campaign of intimidation and punishment against a loyal staffer after she refused to participate in a scheme she said was illegal, according to a new lawsuit.

Monique Mayers said that the rapper, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, put her through an unnecessary court-ordered deposition to scare her, suppressed a flattering Forbes profile about her new business, and gave her phone number to strangers for years.

“Jackson ran his workplace the same way he built his public persona: through fear, humiliation, loyalty tests, and punishment,” Mayers said in the lawsuit filed in Georgia federal court Thursday.

When Jackson found out she had testified before a grand jury in a fraud case against one of his businesses, “his retaliation escalated,” she said in the suit.

“Ms. Mayers received threatening communications, including the message: ‘you will suffer fif,’” she said.

A representative for Jackson said Mayers was just a disgruntled ex-employee looking for a payday.

“This lawsuit is nothing more than a transparent attempt to use the guise of a legal proceeding to seek an unjustified payday well outside of the applicable Statute of Limitations,” the rep said in a statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Moreover, Jackson’s rep said, when Mayers first raised the issue about the threatening text messages and calls, he urged her to report them to the authorities. His attorneys reported the threats proactively, according to the statement.

Mayers, who lives in Georgia, said she worked for Jackson from October 2007 through March 2019, handling operations, tax strategy, communications related to his bankruptcy and more. She was more than an assistant, she said. She was the “backbone” of several of the rapper’s businesses.

The trouble started in 2019 when she refused to put an asset for Jackson’s driver in her own name, according to the lawsuit. Jackson was trying to hide his connection to a payment from bankruptcy authorities, she said.

After that, when she refused to report the driver to police for stealing a car she said he was allowed to drive, she was fired, according to the suit.

She alleges that’s when the real intimidation began. She started receiving dozens of phone calls and texts at all hours from people trying to contact the rapper, because he was giving out her phone number publicly.

He also had his lawyers contact Forbes to retract a profile about Mayers’ work and her new business, telling the magazine that she had embellished her accomplishments and effectively killing her ability to get work as an entertainment industry executive, according to the suit.

Later, Jackson gave Mayers’ name to the FBI on a list of potential witnesses as part of authorities’ investigation into alleged fraud in connection with one of his businesses, she said.

But when he found out that she’d been called to testify before a grand jury, and not just as a witness in a civil case, he lashed out, according to the suit.

In addition to a mountain of new phone calls and texts, she was called into a court-ordered deposition with Jackson’s attorney, she said.

During the deposition, after she’d answered the lawyer’s questions about an FBI investigation, the attorney shifted gears and asked her whether she knew about the perpetrator of an unsolved killing from 2006.

That case happened before she worked for 50 Cent, and was only brought up to scare her, she said.

Jackson has found himself at the center of a number of legal controversies during his long career as a rapper. He filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2015 in a case that has periodically been reopened by other legal issues, including last year when a woman filed a $20 million abuse case against him in New York state court, according to a report by Bloomberg Law.

Sire Spirits, his alcoholic beverage company, was wrapped up in an executive’s embezzlement scheme and separately accused by Remy Martin of trademark infringement.

He was in a public feud that played out on the reality show Vanderpump Rules when film producer Randall Emmett allegedly owed the rapper $1 million and begged Jackson in a text message to hold off his harassment until he could pay him back.

“I’m sorry fofty,” Emmett texted in a message that went viral for its misspelling.