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Lil' Kim - I'm No Check Bouncer
Oct 21, 2005
Lil' Kim might be a convicted liar, but she wants the world to know she doesn't bounce checks.
The pint-sized rapper is lashing out at allegations made in a New York Daily News report that said she wrote rubber checks to the crew hired to shoot a music video last month before she reported to federal prison to begin a year-and-a-day sentence for lying to a grand jury.
Instead Kim, whose real name is Kimberly Jones, squarely placed the blame on the clip's director, Kirk Fraser and his company.
"Any reports of Lil' Kim personally bouncing checks are untrue," Kim’s spokeswoman Tracy Nguyen said in a statement Thursday. "Atlantic Records on behalf of Lil' Kim have fulfilled their financial obligations to Kirk Fraser and May 3rd Films to date. Money owed by Fraser or his company to pay its staff is not Lil' Kim's responsibility."
The rep continued: "Upon being made aware of this incident, [Kim] has expressed deep concern about the situation. Lil' Kim thanks everyone who was involved in the project for their hard work and hopes that May 3rd Films will work quickly to resolve this urgent matter."
Per the Daily News, Fraser had guaranteed employees the checks were in the mail, but 18 of them were not cashable.
The financial faux pas spurred several peeved staffers to take their beef public and even threaten to take Fraser to court if they weren’t compensated.
"I'm prepared to pursue whatever legal road necessary to solve this problem," line producer Heidi Tannenbaum told the Daily News. "This morning I called the whole crew, including the vendors--probably 50 people altogether--and only three people have gotten new checks."
In an interview with E! Online, Fraser insisted blame for the check fiasco lay with Tannenbaum's bookkeeping.
"What the Daily News is reporting isn't correct," Fraser said. "What happened was my line producer was the one handing the finances for [the video] and...once I realized the books weren't right, I stopped payments on every check and me and my producer went through every payment to make sure it's accurate and reissued everyone new checks."
He said that his Washington, D.C., company, May 3rd Films, had hired Tannenbaum, a New York-based line producer who's worked on numerous commercials, to monitor the production's finances.
"When she finished her part of the job, she turned the books over to me, and I've been trying to make sense of them. There are discrepancies--not that I think she's done anything wrong," producer Chan Claggett told E! Online. "There's just some missing information on time sheets, some don't have dates and times or a dollar amount. I've been trying to decipher them for the last two weeks."
Claggett said that every person he's spoken with on the crew is satisfied that the payments were being made.
"The mistake was the crew didn't know what was going on--and most everyone has now gotten paid," said Fraser, clearly frustrated by the negative publicity. "It's just a big-ass mess and has nothing to do with Kim and that's what I hate because they are dragging her through it."
If only accounting snafus were all Lil' Kim had to worry about.
On Sept. 19, the Queen Bee entered the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia, where she's now serving a 366-day sentence stemming from perjury and conspiracy charges for lying to a grand jury about a 2001 shootout at a New York radio station involving her posse and a rival hip-hop crew.
Source : eonline
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