Timbaland Sues Ex-Managers for $15M Over Accusations of ‘Financial Misconduct’
Billboard ·
The veteran hitmaker claims his longtime manager and partner Gary Marella treated him like "a piggy bank" — accusations the manager strongly denies.
Timbaland is suing his former manager and business manager in a $15 million lawsuit that alleges the pair committed widespread misconduct in order to “enrich themselves” at the star’s expense.
The lawsuit, submitted Friday (Oct. 30) to a Los Angeles court and reviewed by Billboard , claims manager Gary Marella “stole millions in unauthorized commissions, fees, and reimbursements” and “falsified financial records” to conceal misdeeds.
The case also alleges that business manager Bruce Seckendorf caused big tax penalties by failing to pay federal taxes and also nearly caused the star’s house to be foreclosed, all while continuing to pay himself and Marella “millions” in fees.
“This is not a case about ordinary business losses or bookkeeping errors,” Timbaland’s lawyers write. “Defendants used their entrusted authority to enrich themselves and others, conceal financial misconduct, and deplete Timbaland’s valuable assets.”
In a response statement to Billboard on Monday (Nov. 2), Marella denied the lawsuit’s allegations, saying the “allegation that I paid myself without his knowledge is not true.”
“When I began managing Tim in 2017, long after he had produced his biggest hits, he was already in a bad financial place,” the manager said. “His financial problems did not begin with me. I came in to help rebuild his business. Over approximately nine years after I started working with Tim, we generated roughly $75 million in business.”
Timbaland (Timothy Zachery Mosley), a hit-making producer behind smash singles like Jay-Z ’s “Big Pimpin’” and Justin Timberlake ’s “SexyBack,” was managed for a decade by Marella, a veteran manager at Mono Music Group. That included Timbaland’s catalog sale to Hipgnosis Songs Fund in 2019, as well as his success with and later sale of Verzuz , a battle rap livestream series that spiked in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The discord between them first became public in August, when Timbaland lodged accusations against the manager as part of a wrongful termination lawsuit filed against the star by DJ E Feezy. In that filing, made in Florida state court, Timbaland blamed Marella for Feezy’s accusations, leveled allegations of financial impropriety and said he had terminated him as his manager more than a year earlier.
In Friday’s complaint, Timbaland doubled down on those accusations, claiming Marella had “treated plaintiff’s income and business ventures as his own checkbook.” The lawsuit claims Marella charged personal expenses to an American Express card, took improper compensation from both the Hipgnosis and Verzuz deals, and then covered his tracks with “falsified financial records” designed to “mislead” the star: “Defendants knew where the money went. Mosley did not.”
The lawsuit takes particular aim at their work on Beatclub, an online marketplace Timbaland and Marella co-founded in 2021 to help creators and producers monetize their beats and music. The producer’s attorneys say Marella “grossly mismanaged” the company and “treated Mosley as a piggy bank to repair the problems he created.”
“Marella depleted investor funds, spent company money contrary to how he represented it would be used, incurred obligations Beatclub could not pay, failed to pay employees and creators he hired, and spent money contrary to board restrictions,” the lawsuit claims. “Instead of disclosing his misconduct and correcting it, Marella repeatedly lied about Beatclub’s financial condition.”
In his response statement to Billboard , Marella disputed those accusations, saying the pair had together “hired a bad CTO who spent a significant amount of our capital, repeatedly missed deadlines, and ultimately failed to build the platform properly.”
“These setbacks created substantial financial challenges for the company,” Marella says. “Beatclub faced the challenges and setbacks that many startups experience. Those difficulties should not be confused with financial misconduct. “
Seckendorf, who has been named a Billboard Top Business Manager for several years running, was the star’s accountant from 1998 onward before also becoming his business manager in 2016, according to the lawsuit. Timbaland’s attorneys claim that move came in the wake of the star discovering “millions of dollars of misconduct” by his previous managers and looking for new advisors.
“Seckendorf presented himself as the person who already knew Mosley’s finances, could repair the damage, and would prevent the same thing from happening again,” Timbaland’s lawyers write in the court filings. “Instead, defendants recreated, and substantially worsened, the very circumstances that Mosley had trusted them to prevent.”
Seckendorf did not immediately return a request for comment on the accusations.
In technical legal terms, the lawsuit accuses both men of breach of fiduciary duty, fraudulent concealment and civil theft. It also accuses Marella specifically of fraud, breach of contract and misappropriation of his likeness, and accuses Seckendorf specifically of professional negligence and aiding and abetting a breach of fiduciary duty. It seeks at least $15 million in damages, as well as other monetary penalties and injunctions.