French Montana settled a $1M watch lawsuit, but a judge denied a request to seal the records from public view despite concerns.
French Montana settled the $1 million Richard Mille watch lawsuit that’s been on his back since last fall and then immediately moved to bury every document connected to the case.
A federal judge in Nevada shut that down, and that ruling means the settlement terms are now headed for public view, whether he likes it or not.
The court denied his motion to seal the complaint, ruling that the case had been publicly accessible since it was filed on October 17, 2025 and that major outlets had already run detailed coverage of the allegations.
French’s legal team argued that keeping the claims in the public record, even after a resolution, posed a serious reputational risk given his profile and how fast coverage around his name spreads and gets distorted.
The judge found no compelling basis to grant that and made clear that embarrassment alone doesn’t justify sealing court files.
The backstory goes back to Paris Fashion Week in January 2025, when Justo Obiang and Samir Gato, who’d known French for over 15 years, agreed to loan him their Richard Mille RM-59-01, a watch they originally bought for around $450,000 in 2016 that had climbed well past $1 million in value by the time litigation started.
French handed over one of his own watches as collateral and committed to returning the piece within 30 days. As AllHipHop first reported, the watch he gave them as collateral turned out to be a counterfeit, and he stopped responding to both men after that.
Attorney Steve Haddad came out hard against the lawsuit when it first went public, saying the claims were untrue and insisting that French accepted the watch as payment for promotional work he did in Egypt at Obiang’s request, not as a loan.
The two sides reached a settlement before the case went to trial, but neither party has confirmed the terms. The court’s refusal to seal the record is what will bring those details into public view.
The judge drove the point home by pulling a line directly from French’s own catalog, citing his lyric “it don’t matter what you do, man, they still gon’ hate you” from “Salam Alaykum” in the April 23 ruling denying the seal.
