Right or wrong to release 2Pac's posthumous sex tape?

Picture this, you’re a young guy of who is all of 20 years old and you’ve just achieved a little fame with a rap group, just signed a deal with Interscope for your first album and for the first time in your life, girls are just loving all over you. Any 20 year old guy is going to take some advantage of that situation, and Tupac Shakur was no different.

According to TMZ, a 5 minute video tape of Tupac Shakur receiving oral sex from a woman while partying with members of the rap group Digital Underground and listening to his own music has surfaced, and the entrepeneurs responsible for digging it up plan to cash in on their finding.

According to a report from TMZ, “the tape, shot in 1991, begins with a bunch of groupies in a living room during a house party. Tupac [Shakur] walks into the room with his pants down to his ankles, his shirt off … sporting several chains.” Sounds pretty cocky, but again, he was a typical 20 year old kid, AND he was a famous rapper. It’s no secret that Tupac had groupies. That’s not exactly breaking news.

The TMZ report goes on to say that 2Pac, “pulls one of the women toward him, and she begins performing oral sex. As she does her thing, an unreleased song of Tupac’s is playing in the background, as Tupac is singing along and dancing, wiggling his hips.”

Apparantly, all of this was going on in plain sight as Tupac was standing next to his Digital Underground group members, swigging a cocktail and smoking a blunt. To sum it up, Tupac as showing off and trying to be cool, typical young male bravado.

The corker to this whole tawdry scenario is that, while receiving oral sex from a groupie, “Tupac, who is holding a cocktail in one hand and a blunt in another, Money B from Digital Underground walks over to him. Tupac puts his cocktail arm around Money B, continues singing and dancing … and the woman never stops.”

Here’s what disturbes me, according to TMZ who broke this Tupac Shakur sex tape news, the people who leaked the sex tape plan to sell it for a profit and have it widely distributed. So what do you think? Is distributing a celebrity sex tape after that celebrity has died extremely unethical and just plain wrong?

I know that Tupac Shakur has released quite a bit of unreleased work after his death, but I don’t think this kind of release is what he or his estate had in mind for preserving Tupac’s legacy.

RIP September 13, 1996

Today, September 13, 2011, marks the 15th anniversary of the passing of Tupac Shakur: rapper, poet and social justice activist. On September 13, 1996, the world lost the greatest rap artist that the world had ever known, devastating a generation of fans around the globe.

Tupac Shakur has gone on to sell more than 50 million albums worldwide since his death, with 7 of his albums, filled with new material, being released posthumously. College courses are being taught on Shakur’s poetry and rap music, and countless artists continue to try to re-capture Tupac Shakur’s magic on the mic. Last year Shakur’s hit single, “Dear Mama,” was inducted into the Library of Congress on Mother’s Day.

On September 13, 1996 Tupac Shakur died in a Las Vegas, Nevada hospital from complications he sustained from a gun shot wound that traveled from the late artist’s hip up into his lung. Tupac Shakur’s murder was never solved, but is suspected to be connected to the world that Marion “Suge” Knight inhabited and Knight’s affiliation with the Los Angeles Bloods gang.

Since Tupac Shakur’s untimely passing, his mother Afeni Shakur-Davis has built a thriving foundation in her late son’s name: Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation and the Tupac Shakur Center for the Arts located in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

In rememberance of Shakur on the 15th anniversary of his passing, “The Shakur Estate and Universal Music Enterprises are welcoming all fans of 2Pac and rap music to remember the life of a great man whose works and spirit have touched the world. From September 13, through September 18, 2pac.com, the official site of the Shakur Estate, will be featuring articles about 2Pac’s work, a video about his life and, of course, the music that has touched so many.

“It was Tupac’s greatest wish to inspire minds and spark the ideas that would change the world. It is the greatest privilege of 2pac.com and Universal Music Enterprises to keep his music and message available to all,” according to Universal Music Enterprises.

Visit www.2pac.com to remember Tupac Shakur.

Tupac Shakur

Shortly after the iconic late rapper and actor Tupac Shakur was released from prison in 1995, he claimed in an MTV interview with Tabitha Soren that he knew who shot him on that fateful night at the Quad City recording studios in New York in 1994, asserting that it was an orchestrated robbery and attempted hit with a tie to his east coast rivals, pointing the finger at Bad Boy Records. This was a claim that Sean Diddy Combs and Notorious B.I.G. vehemently denied at the time.

Apparently there was something to Tupac Shakur‘s 1995 accusations and his unrelenting vendetta against Bad Boy and many east coast music industry executives back in the 1990s. It was an anger that Shakur held onto until he passed away from additional gunshot wounds on September 13, 1996.

According to AllHipHop.com, “A convicted murderer, long suspected of involvement in the 1994 Quad Studios shooting of Tupac Shakur, has finally admitted to committing the crime, and has accused Game’s manager, Jimmy “Henchmen” Rosemond — founder of Czar Entertainment — of masterminding the botched robbery, which left the legendary rapper shot five times.”

The above allegation and alleged confession comes from Dexter Isaac who was, no doubt, a low level pawn in the whole east coast/west coast rap wars that left the industry’s two brightest stars, Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., dead from fatal gunshot wounds long before their time.

Jimmy “Henchman” Rosemond was allegedly a long time business associate of Bad Boy and of Sean Diddy Combs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what Tupac was trying to scream from the rooftops throughout the last year of his life; Shakur’s anger no doubt fuled by his less than savory association with Death Row Records svengali-like co-founder, Suge Knight.

The AllHipHop.com exclusive goes on to quote Dexter Isaac as stating, “In 1994, James Rosemond hired me to rob 2Pac Shakur at the Quad Studio.” Isaac is currently housed in Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Metropolitan Detention Center. “He gave me $2,500, plus all the jewelry I took, except for one ring, which he wanted for himself. It was the biggest of the two diamond rings that we took. He said he wanted to put the stone in a new setting for his girlfriend at the time, Cynthia Ried. I still have as proof the chain that we took that night in the robbery,” concluded Isaac.

On the flipside of AllHipHop’s exclusive claim given to them by Issac, James Rosemond’s attorney (who also happens to be my cousin, hi cuz!) tells a different story. Lichtman told the New York Post, “Rosemond’s lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman trashed Isaac’s statement: “He’s a convicted killer who was brought back by the US Attorney, solely to cooperate against Jimmy Rosemond, and wouldn’t you know it, he spins this tale.”

My cousin is a brilliant criminal defense attorney, but to his credit, Isaac has yet to be proven as a credible source. The jury is still out.

As a longtime fan of Tupac Shakur’s rap music and his poetry, I have been following this case as well as the cold case surrounding his 1996 murder, for the better part of a decade. I had the pleasure of speaking with Tupac’s mother’s attorney, Dina LaPolt, back in 2005. LaPolt works with Tupac’s mother Afeni Shakur and helps Shakur to manage Tupac Shakur’s legacy and all of the estate’s finances, licenses and it’s non-profit organization, TASF.

Here are excerpts from my 2005 interview with Afeni Shakur’s longtime attorney, Dina LaPolt:

PR.com: You are responsible for freeing up millions of dollars in frozen assets and unpaid royalties of Tupac. Where were these assets tangled up and how did you untangle them?

Dina LaPolt: When Tupac died, he never had a music lawyer. When you are a recording artist every royalty payment that goes to producers and other third party royalty participants, people that perform on your album, comes out of the artist’s royalty. And if they write music with the artist, then the artist has to do agreements with them, like song split agreements, so these people share in the publishing money. When Tupac died, nothing was papered on his behalf. Under the terms of his recording agreement, they were still allowed to release all his albums notwithstanding the fact that none of the paperwork was done, and they just didn’t pay him. They just froze all the royalty streams and kept their profits. When I got involved, there was literally over $13 million dollars in frozen royalty payments that belonged to Tupac, his producers, all his co-writers… it was just awful. Me in connection with another lawyer, Donald David, who was very influential in getting this untangled as well, and then the lawyer for our publishing company, Robert Allen, we literally…two and a half years of our lives we just went song by song and worked out all the copyright splits.

PR.com: Did any of that money have to go to Marion (Suge) Knight?

Dina LaPolt: No, by the time I got involved, Donald David had already litigated Death Row [Records] and Suge Knight, and got all the intellectual properties reverted to Afeni Shakur. When I got involved, the estate was in a very litigious time. And I was the person who was brought in to help make it into a business. [Suge Knight] has two record albums that he still owns that are now distributed by Koch Records. So, he gets royalties on those, and he also gets royalties on some of the albums that we have on Interscope.

PR.com: These nine albums that came out after Tupac’s death in 1996… where did all of this material come from?

Dina LaPolt: Tupac, when he died, he left behind 154 unreleased master recordings. He told everyone he was gonna die. I mean if you’ve seen the film, so see the end when he says, “I don’t have time here!” He goes “I don’t have time to lay the hook! You do that after I leave!”

PR.com: Why did he think he was gonna die young?

Dina LaPolt: He just did. He said, even in the movie, you heard him say, “when I’m gone, you’re gonna have all this material to be released.” And as he’s talking, they showcased each album we’ve released over the years.

CLICK TO READ MY ENTIRE INTERVIEW WITH AFENI SHAKUR’S ATTORNEY, DINA LAPOLT