Ryan Leslie has been actively promoting his latest album “Les is More,” but the singer/songwriter learned Wednesday that he will actually have to do more… with less.
A jury ruled against R. Les, forcing him to fork over a whopping $1 million reward to the German man who returned the star’s stolen laptop. ” ‘Ain’t no way to get around ups & downs.’ Jury of my peers rules for the plaintiff,” Leslie tweeted in reaction to the verdict after leaving federal court in Manhattan.
It all started back in 2010 after RL’s computer, filled with a number of unreleased music files was stolen while he was in Germany. Eager to reclaim the work that he’d lost, Leslie offered a million-dollar reward to the person who returned the computer to him. However, when Armin Augstein recovered and returned the laptop, Ryan refused to pay up claiming that the hard drive was corrupted and he never actually retrieved his intellectual properties.
Back in October, Ryan Les told “RapFix Live” that he lost a portion of his “Les is More” LP as well as collaborations that he had been cooking with Jay-Z and Kanye West for their high-profile 2011 “Watch the Throne” album. “There were records that I was working on, multi-tracks that I had for the “Watch the Throne” album,” R. Les said. “If you read the credits for “Watch the Throne,” I’m not on that album. And obviously my album isn’t on there.”
According to the New York Post, Judge Harold Baer Jr. told jurors that because Leslie returned the hard drive to the manufacturer after getting it back from Augstein (instead of immediately turning it in as evidence), they could assume that the missing files were there when Augstein returned the laptop.
