Who Inherited MF DOOM's Estate After He Died?

Like many aspects of his life, the death of rapper MF DOOM (aka Daniel Dumile Thompson) was for a long time shrouded in mystery. His wife Jasmine officially announced the tragic news in an Instagram post on New Year's Eve 2020, but the rapper had actually passed away two months earlier on Halloween, a revelation that confused some fans, particularly as his social media channels had remained active after that time. However, some fans on Reddit claimed that it was actually the rapper's wife who was in charge of his social media accounts, which was proved correct in the aftermath of his death.

Few details are known of Dumile's family — as his masked persona would suggest, he tended to keep his personal life private. In a hearing held after his untimely death, his wife, Jasmine Dumile Thompson, confirmed they had five children together (per Leeds Live), and he had another child from a prior relationship. Tragically, one of their children, a son named King Malachi Ezekiel Dumile, died of unknown causes in 2017 at the age of 14. Dumile's brother and fellow rapper in the 1990s hip-hop group KMD died in 1993 in a traffic collision. It is to be assumed that his inheritors are thus his wife and four surviving children, with Jasmine — whom Dumile's official website describes as his business partner — currently in control of his estate and spearheading legal action required to protect his legacy.

Daniel Dumile Thompson ​​left behind him a wealth of intellectual property in his music — though some of the rights are in the hands of record labels he worked with down the years — as well as the company Gas Drawls LLC, which controls his estate and merchandising.

At the time his death was announced, the company was busy promoting a new reel filter that would insert a DOOM mask into a person's social media videos. But the project is just one of many the company has continued to release. In the years since Jasmine Thompson announced the death of her husband on Instagram, she has continued to defend and promote MF DOOM's cultural legacy. She has kept up a constant release schedule of repressings of his classic albums and fresh ranges of merchandise (including clothes and accessories) on the Gas Drawls website. In May 2021, the company trademarked the name "MF DOOM," reserving the right to use it on a wide range of items.

Jasmine Thompson's ferocity in protecting her husband's intellectual property came into focus in the fall of 2023. At this time, outlets including Pitchfork reported on a new legal battle that she and Gas Drawls LLC had instigated against the owner of one of MF DOOM's former record labels. The action was taken against Eothen "Egon" Alapatt, better known within hip-hop simply as Egon, the former manager and A&R at the respected Stones Throw record label that released his most critically acclaimed album, "Madvillainy," a collaboration with producer Madlib under the monicker Madvillain. Thompson alleges that Egon has refused to return 31 notebooks belonging to MF DOOM that contain countless verses that he had written over the years. 

Thompson had shared screenshots on Instagram of the rapper's emails to Egon from 2016, in which he attempted to have the notebooks returned. It is alleged that Egon paid $12,500 to the landlord of the rapper's Los Angeles studio for the notebooks. But Egon has claimed that the fee was back rent that Dumile owed on the property, and that paying it off he was now the owner of the notebooks, if not the intellectual property they contained. Per Pitchfork, Thompson is suing for the return of the notebooks alleging "copyright infringement, fraud, intentional misrepresentation, and unjust enrichment." Egon has previously had similar disputes with the rapper Talib Kweli and the mother of the producer J Dilla.