Why Aaliyah’s Family Is Still Fighting in Court — 5 Years After Her Music Catalog Returned

In May 2021, three months before Aaliyah’s music catalog returned to market after a decade of infighting over her estate, the late singer’s family members signed a deal directing how they’d split up royalties once Blackground Records began making money from it again.

It wasn’t long before that contract became the topic of lawsuits — and now, five years after a moment that was supposed to end the long-running family drama for good, the court fight is ongoing.

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That’s perhaps unsurprising. Aaliyah’s family was well known for feuding during the decade her music was out of circulation — a fact some say is to blame for the catalog’s long dormancy.

Historically, the disagreements were between Barry Hankerson, Aaliyah’s uncle and the owner of Blackground Records, and the late singer’s estate, controlled by her mother, Diane Haughton. But the contract in question didn’t involve Diane. This time, Barry is pitted against Aaliyah’s cousin, Jomo Hankerson — his own son.

In the May 2021 deal, Barry and Jomo Hankerson signed a written agreement granting Jomo a 20% stake in Blackground. The Blackground catalog encompasses most of Aaliyah’s music, including her albums One in a Million and Aaliyah, as well as early masters for Timbaland & Magoo, Tank, Toni Braxton and JoJo.

The contract coincided with Barry finally agreeing, after years of stops and starts, to a distribution deal with EMPIRE that would finally make the music available again. The Bay Area-based music company put out the Blackground catalog as planned — on streaming services for the first time, and re-issued in physical formats after years out of print — via a series of rolling releases between August and October 2021.

While the music releases went smoothly and led to commercial success, including top 10 entries on multiple Billboard charts, trouble was already brewing behind the scenes. Jomo sued Barry at the end of the release schedule, claiming in an October 2021 lawsuit that his father had not delivered his 20% of the profits as promised.

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In response, Barry leveled a shocking claim: that Jomo had coerced him into signing over an unearned 20% share in Blackground by stealing Aaliyah’s master recordings while his father was recovering from a stroke in early 2021. According to Barry, Jomo threatened to leak the masters online — ruining the then-pending deal with EMPIRE — unless he was given a hefty stake in the catalog. Barry said he had given Jomo the shares under “great duress” while still in fragile health and sought to void the contract entirely.

Ultimately, Jomo and Barry resolved the lawsuit in late 2022 with a settlement, in which Barry agreed to pay Jomo a $1.3 million lump sum. Going forward, this agreement would reduce Jomo’s ownership stake in the Blackground catalog from 20% to 12%. But the peace would not hold for long.

Blackground’s work continued to chug along as the years went by. The label’s catalog remained commercially available, and it put out two posthumous Aaliyah tracks: “Poison,” a 2021 collaboration with The Weeknd, and “Gone” featuring Tank, which topped Billboard’s Adult R&B Airplay chart in 2025. Blackground also continued to make deals in the industry, naming a new president in October 2021, plotting a posthumous album release and selling its composition rights to the upstart firm Legacy Publishing earlier this year, among other publicly reported moves.

But at the beginning of 2026, Jomo once again sued his father for failing to pay his share of the Blackground royalties, claiming Barry had worked to “systematically cheat” him out of his 12% with a series of fraudulent “schemes and machinations.”

In the new lawsuit, Jomo asked a judge to hold Barry accountable to the 2022 settlement and claimed his father had refused to share any portion of the $15 million in profits he had received from two unspecified transactions over the years.

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Barry responded once again by seeking to void his son’s ownership stake in Blackground. In a June 2026 countersuit, he claimed that, just like the original 2021 share-split agreement, Jomo had also strong-armed him into signing the 2022 settlement, again by threatening to post Aaliyah’s unreleased music online.

Barry’s latest court filings also alleged that Jomo engaged in widespread financial misconduct when he worked for Blackground years earlier. Barry went so far as to say his son was partially to blame for the 2001 plane crash that killed Aaliyah at the age of 22: “[Jomo] failed in his responsibility to accompany and coordinate the travel of his late cousin, Aaliyah, to a music video shoot in the Bahamas,” read the countersuit. “Tragically, it is well known that she passed away as a result of a plane crash that took place during that trip — travel that was not coordinated by [Jomo] and travel that may have been avoided had [Jomo] followed through on his compensated task of travel coordination.”

Both Jomo’s lawsuit and Barry’s counterclaims remain pending in Georgia court. Lawyers on both sides of the litigation did not return Billboard’s requests for comment.

Over the years, Aaliyah’s official estate (known as Aaliyah LLC) has publicly distanced itself from Blackground’s operations. Run by Diane, who is Aaliyah’s mother and Barry’s sister, the estate does not own any shares in the music catalog. For a decade, Barry’s stated reason for the Blackground catalog not being available was a personal one: his understanding that Diane, from whom he has been largely estranged in the 25 years since Aaliyah’s death, did not want the music out, with Barry unwilling to go against his sister’s purported wishes. (The Aaliyah estate has denied this.)

Diane has not been involved at all in the financial feud between Jomo and Barry. She has, however, found herself in a separate, drawn-out legal skirmish with her brother since Aaliyah’s music returned to market five years ago. According to court filings, Diane demanded a $243,000 royalty payment from Blackground in July 2021, which the label ultimately paid her in 2023.

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Blackground sued Diane to claw back this royalty in 2024, claiming it was actually barred by the terms of a 2003 settlement between Virgin Records and Aaliyah’s estate. In that deal, Virgin paid Aaliyah’s parents a confidential sum to resolve their claims that the label’s alleged negligence was partly to blame for her deadly plane crash.

At the time of her death, Aaliyah was jointly signed to Blackground and Virgin. Blackground thus alleges that the broad release of claims in the Virgin wrongful death settlement should also prohibit Aaliyah’s parents from demanding any additional money from Barry’s label.

The lawsuit against Diane was initially dropped after Blackground failed to serve her with court papers. Blackground refiled the claims this past May, though court records show Diane has yet to be served with the lawsuit. Diane’s lawyer tells Billboard they cannot comment on a lawsuit that’s never been served.

As these various legal battles continue to play out in court, Barry is still operating Blackground — or as it’s generally referred to now, “Blackground 2.0.” While the label is no longer under its distribution deal with EMPIRE, Barry has since found another distributor, and the catalog is still available on streaming services. It’s not clear whether new physical albums are being produced at the moment.

Blackground also has a frontline division with a roster including soul artist Cecily Wilborn, rapper Yung Booke, R&B group Final Draft and gospel singer Carvin Winans of the legendary Winans family.

Then there’s the lure of a posthumous Aaliyah album. Since the re-release of her music in 2021, Barry has been saying he’s hard at work on a complete collection of new music from his niece called Unstoppable. It’s a promise that’s been repeated over the years, and one that has come close to fruition at times but never actually gotten over the line. It’s the one thing that fans of the singer have been clamoring for in the quarter-century since she passed away, with intense curiosity over what remains unreleased.