To be clear about what happened, because the headlines are making it messier than it needs to be, this was the fourth trial in a fight that has dragged on since 2020, and it was narrow by design. The jury was not asked to decide whether MGA copied the OMG Girlz. An earlier jury already answered that back in 2024. This jury had one job, to decide whether MGA acted with enough malice to owe punitive damages on top of what it already owes. They decided it did not, so the number attached to that question is zero.
The backstory is pure Baller Alert. Tiny Harris put the OMG Girlz together in 2009, a vibrant teen trio built around her daughter Zonnique Pullins alongside Bahja Rodriguez and Breaunna Womack. Their whole identity was the look, neon hair, bold colorful outfits, and a name that stuck. Then in December 2020, Tiny says she spotted a doll on a store shelf that looked awfully familiar. She and T.I. accused MGA of lifting the group’s name, hairstyles, and overall style for seven specific dolls in its billion dollar O.M.G. line.
What followed was a courtroom rollercoaster that would exhaust anybody. The first trial ended in a mistrial in early 2023. The second trial later that year cleared MGA completely, but that verdict got wiped out on appeal after a shift in Supreme Court precedent. The third trial in September 2024 is where the couple finally broke through, when a jury found that MGA had misappropriated the OMG Girlz name, likeness, and identity and handed down roughly $71 million, about $17.9 million in profits plus $53.6 million in punitive damages.
That $71 million dollar headline did not last long. In the summer of 2025, Judge James V. Selna threw out the $53.6 million punitive portion, ruling that the evidence did not clearly and convincingly show MGA willfully set out to copy the OMG Girlz. He gave T.I. and Tiny a choice, accept a single dollar in punitive damages and close the book, or roll the dice on a whole new trial focused only on that one question. They chose to fight. This week’s verdict was the result of that choice, and the dice came up cold.
MGA has denied wrongdoing at every step. Its billionaire founder Isaac Larian testified in earlier proceedings that T.I., Tiny, and the group had nothing to do with designing his dolls, and at one point he called the family extortionists. The company’s lawyers have argued that OMG is a generic phrase splashed all over pop culture and cannot be treated as proof that anybody copied anything. This jury, hearing a slimmed down version of the case, evidently found that argument, or at least the absence of proven malice, persuasive enough to hold the line at zero.
T.I. and Tiny are not accepting the loss quietly. Through their legal team, led by attorney John Keville, the couple said they appreciated the jury’s time but were disappointed in the verdict, and they made a pointed argument that matters here. They said they already proved malice once, and they believe that if this jury had sat through the full three weeks of evidence the previous jury saw, it would have landed in the same place. In earlier statements the couple framed the entire battle as bigger than themselves, saying it shows how hard it is for creatives, especially Black artists and young entrepreneurs, to protect their work from billion dollar corporations.
And that is the real weight of this story, beyond the dollar figures bouncing around. Stripped all the way down, T.I. and Tiny still won the core of their case. A jury agreed MGA crossed a line, and the roughly $17.9 million judgment for that infringement still stands. What they lost this week was the extra punishment money, the part meant to send a message loud enough that a corporation feels it. For a family that has spent six years and four trials trying to make that message stick, walking away with the win but without the muscle behind it has to feel hollow.
Whether this is truly the end is another question entirely. The couple has appealed, retried, and refused to fold at every single fork in this road, and nothing about their track record suggests they are done talking. Six years in, the OMG Girlz case has become less about a line of dolls and more about whether a Black owned creative brand can hold a corporate giant all the way accountable inside a courtroom. This week the answer came back complicated. They kept the verdict that says they were right. They just did not get the number that says it mattered.
