Spin has reported that M.I.A. was told by Jay-Z that she should sign the settlement for the massive lawsuit from the NFL as result of her Super Bowl halftime performance. M.I.A. appeared on stage for less than two minutes during Madonna’s performance at the Super Bowl XLVI halftime show in 2012 for a version of the song “Give Me All Your Luvin” during which she gave a middle finger to the camera. The NFL was so outraged by the gesture that they sought legal damages to the tune of over 16 million dollars.
Had M.I.A. signed the settlement offer she would have had to pay the NFL for a seemingly indefinite amount of time. At the time M.I.A. was managed by Jay-Z’s Roc Nation management company. Since then, she has left Roc Nation and eventually settled with the NFL for an undisclosed amount.
M.I.A has been laying low in the past couple of years since the release of her 2016 album AIM, deleting her Twitter account, and curating the 2017 version of the Meltdown Festival.
You can read M.I.A.’s statement about the incident below
If you’re talking about racism and sexism, [the lawsuit] showed the cracks in everyone I knew. I was at Roc Nation at the time and Jay Z was managing me. The lawsuit was so ridiculous, it proposed that they would keep one hundred percent of my earnings for the rest of my life if I ever earned more than $2 million dollars. Jay Z was, like, ‘you should sign that shit’ and I was, like, ‘no.’
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