Ex-Ruthless Records Rapper Exposes Eazy-E Lawsuit They Kept Out Of 'Straight Outta Compton'

The N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton arrived in 2015 and painted a Hollywood portrait of the pioneering West Coast gangsta rap group. Considering director F. Gary Gray only had so much time to tell the story, plenty of details were left out. For starters, J.J. Fad wasn’t even mentioned despite their undeniable impact on the success of Ruthless Records and Dr. Dre’s assault on former Pump It Up! host Dee Barnes was conveniently omitted, too.

According to former Ruthless artist BG Knocc Out, there was another interesting chapter left out of the film. During a recent interview with VladTV,  the veteran rapper was discussing The Mysterious Death of Eazy-E television series when Jerry Heller came up. A longtime music manager, Heller was responsible for the careers of both N.W.A and Eazy-E as well as numerous Los Angeles rap and R&B artists.

But at one point, BG Knocc Out said Heller had attempted to sue Eazy-E, something he denied prior to his 2016 death. 

“Eazy, the day he came into the studio and we was recording the song ‘Doggpound Killer,’ he was supposed to do a verse on there,” BG Knocc Out explained. “He had eight bars to put on that song. Sometime throughout the course of time he was in the studio, his lungs collapsed and then I go sit in the hallway with him while he’s wheezing, and he had a big manila envelope.

“The guy Donovan who owned Audio Achievements, he came and sat on the other side of Eazy. Eazy was showing him papers … but he was telling him, ‘Look at what Jerry’s been doing and now he’s trying to sue me because I fired him’ …  I was sitting right there.”

Jerry Heller filed a $110 million lawsuit against the Straight Outta Compton filmmakers in October 2015. F. Gary Gray, the Oscar-nominated screenwriters, Legendary Pictures, Ice Cube and the estate of Eazy-E were just a few of the many named in the suit.

Not only was he unhappy with the way he was depicted in the film, Heller claimed a significant amount of the movie’s content had been stolen from his autobiography without permission. The defendants countered with a request Heller’s defamation charges be dismissed. In December 2018, two years after Heller’s death, the lawsuit was tossed out.

Elsewhere in the interview, BG Knocc Out discussed the upcoming Super Bowl LVI Pepsi halftime show featuring Dr. Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar and Mary J. Blige and his hopes for an Eazy-E shoutout.

“That’s one of my gripes with this whole music thing, bro, is that Eazy is just forgotten about, which is so fucking disheartening to me and disrespectful on so many levels,” he said. “It’s like people just forgot about him. I would hope they would shout him out. That would be nice.”

The Super Bowl LVI takes place on February 13, 2022 at the SoFi Stadium just outside Los Angeles, the home of the Rams and Chargers.