The Roc-A-Fella co-founder opened up about where his career has led him financially, and why he’s been unable to pay the amount of child support he’s been ordered to.
Damon Dash made the revelation on “The CEO Show” with Dr. Taje Moreno on the Nu Network. He claimed that the court and Roy’s attorneys are erroneously considering his net worth from decades ago to extract money he no longer earns. Because his current business ventures are not making money, he can’t meet the child support arrangements he has for years struggled to pay.
“While I’m investing in something else, I might not be making the money and the profit, so I can’t afford to pay out what I was when I was having EBITA of eight million dollars a year. So, you can’t judge how much I’m gonna pay out by how much I made 20 years ago,” he said.
The 52-year-old said that in recent years he’s been forced to “start [a] new company from scratch without any money to start it with,” which was further complicated by “the recession” and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I had to do it [by] rubbing two sticks together. So I can’t pay out three or four hundred thousand a year in child support, ‘cause I ain’t making that,” he continued. “But I’m not ashamed of that because I have things to show for it, but it hasn’t profited yet. I’m like a proud broke—but it ain’t broke, because I have things to show for it.”
Dash said that the amount of money he was ordered to pay in child support to his ex-wife Rachel Roy, whom he divorced in 2009, was calculated based on his earnings at the time, including one of Roy’s fashion lines. That line is controlled by her, he said, though his ownership stake in the line was a big deciding factor in what he would have to pay here.