Days before his death, Sexyy Red sat down to write an emotional letter to a judge about late Grammy-nominated producer Tay Keith—a move that captures one of hip-hop’s messier open wounds and the complex friendship that refuses easy answers.
Sexyy wrote the letter on June 6, 2026, just days before Tay Keith’s death. Tay Keith, born Brytavious Lakeith Chambers, was found dead on June 18, 2026, at age 29. But that letter—obtained by TMZ and released this week—has resurfaced at the worst possible time, forcing the culture to confront an uncomfortable reality: two artists who genuinely loved each other were caught in a legal battle neither seems to have wanted.
The beef was never really between them anyway. In March 2026, Tay sued Sexyy’s label, Rebel Music, claiming he produced 13 songs for her in 2024, including “Pound Town”. The hits that broke her into the mainstream—the club bangers, the Drake features, the cultural moments—he built a lot of that sonic foundation. But Tay claimed Sexyy’s label was refusing to provide him with any accounting for the revenues generated by the songs so that he could get his cut of the royalties. We’re talking millions in streaming, licensing, and performance royalties at stake.
When that lawsuit dropped publicly two weeks ago, social media went feral. Screenshots. allegations. Fans blaming Sexyy for “finessing” her collaborator. The narrative was simple and brutal: she got rich off his beats and left him dry.
But the letter complicates it. In her letter, Sexyy disputes the claims made in Tay’s case and says she recently learned that she was named as a defendant, adding, “I am appalled and furthermore hurt by the allegations made.” She wasn’t even trying to dodge—she was hurt. Sexyy said she was an artist who was not “allowed to pay producers” and that all this is handled by the record label. That’s the real sting: she had no control over the money.
She explained to the judge, “Tay Keith and I are great working partners and even greater friends. If the label owes him money, I’m sure they have started the process to get him paid.” The letter reads like someone defending a brother—because that’s what Tay was. She even noted that “There are several songs that Tay Keith and I have worked on together that I haven’t received payment for yet”—meaning she was also getting finessed by the same machine.
Tay’s camp kept repeating it too. A rep said, “The dispute is between the parties’ respective labels. Naming Sexyy Red in the lawsuit was a legal formality. Any allegations are directed at the label, not Red personally. Tay and Red remained friends and he considered her a sister.” They were still in the studio together before he died. This wasn’t a beef—it was business gone wrong, with the label caught in the middle and two artists bleeding the same way.
The label’s attorney, Dameka Davis, told TMZ “Royalty negotiations are handled by labels — not artists” and that “the royalty issues were being resolved in the weeks before Tay’s death”. Too late. The money never got to him. The clarity never came until the eulogy.
This is what the culture keeps missing: the artist vs. artist narrative sells clicks, but the real story is the machine grinding up everybody—the superstar and the super-producer both. Sexyy Red sitting down to defend herself wasn’t arrogance. It was a woman watching her brother sued and not having the power to fix it, writing to a judge in the only way the system would let her speak. That’s the tragedy nobody talks about.
