Mark Curry says he made $69 off the song of his that appeared in “Sean Combs: The Reckoning,” and he is finished being quiet about it. The former Bad Boy artist posted a video to Instagram laying out everything he says went wrong with the Netflix documentary, from a production credit he never received to a book that stopped selling once the doc came out. He posted it days after the documentary won an Emmy.
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Start with the money, because that is the part that will make you sit up. Curry talked about “Come With Me,” the Godzilla song he appeared on, during the documentary. He says that segment was viewed more than 50 million times. What was not in place was a sync license, which is the agreement that pays a songwriter when their music is used in a film or television show. Curry says he expected to have one. He says he was told that because he was only speaking about the song, no license was necessary. His total take was $69. He called it terrible and said that if anyone actually wanted to help the victims, securing that license was the obvious way to do it.Then there is the credit. Curry says he was promised a production credit and built the documentary the way he did because of it. He says he brought the talent to the project, and that almost everybody he wrote about in his book ended up on screen because he got them there. He says the promise specifically included being grandfathered into the deal if the documentary was ever sold, because he had helped produce it. His assessment of how that turned out was blunt. He said this was worse than any deal he ever had with Puff, worse than the worst deal.
For anyone who does not know the backstory, Curry was signed to Bad Boy in the early 2000s and wrote “Dancing With the Devil,” a memoir about his years inside the label. It was one of the earliest public accounts of what he says happened there, and for a long time he was treated like a man with an axe to grind. Then the allegations against Sean Combs went public and his book started reading like evidence.
Which is what makes his next point land so hard. Curry says his book sales dwindled after the documentary aired. Once people saw him talking on Netflix, he says, they assumed there was nothing left to learn and that the interesting parts had already been told. So the project he says he helped build ended up competing with the work he owns outright. No credit on the one, almost no money from the other.
He also says he tried repeatedly to do other business with 50 Cent and got nowhere. He pitched a literary project. He pitched a new documentary. He says every angle felt like begging. He says he was told they did not stand behind the documentary he was pitching, and he could not square that with what he sees as the reality: they would not back his project, but they would take the book he wrote, make a documentary out of it, watch it go number one, and give him no credit.
Curry also raised something a lot of people have wondered about out loud. He said he saw 50 Cent say the proceeds would go toward the victims, and that he has not seen that happen. He said he waited patiently trying to figure out what it was all for and nothing came of it. It has been almost a year, he said, and if anything was going to happen it would have happened by now.
Then came the Emmys. Curry said he is watching people get nominated for an award off other people’s stories and off other people’s pain, while nothing is being done to reach back for the actual victims. He asked how in the world you get an award for another man’s story.
Here is what actually happened at the ceremony. “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” went in with three nominations and won one, Outstanding Picture Editing for a Nonfiction Program, for the episode “Blink Again,” at the Creative Arts Emmys on September 5. It lost Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series to “Mr. Scorsese” and lost directing to “My Mom Jayne.” 50 Cent was in Canada and found out by phone. He posted about it anyway, writing that he won an Emmy and asking his critics whether they still thought he was taking a loss. The doc had already pulled 21.8 million views in its first six days after dropping on Netflix in December 2025.
The last part of Curry’s video widened out past his own situation. He said he is still fighting through literary agents and agents at WME and elsewhere who are supposed to help Black stories reach platforms and do not. He said they will hand somebody a publishing deal for a cookbook before they give a deal to someone with an actual story to tell. If that does not change, he said, our stories get mumbled out and muffled out and our history becomes a mystery.
He said he knows other people in his position are staying quiet because they are afraid, or because they still believe a promise is coming. He does not believe one is. He closed by shouting out everyone who was part of the documentary and never got the acknowledgment or the light they were looking for, telling them that even when they think nobody is thinking about them, he is.
Neither 50 Cent nor Netflix has responded to Curry’s video.
