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April Washington-Essex, who runs Habakkuk Music, didn’t option a second album by performer Isaiah D. Thomas because, she says, God has not told her to move on it yet.
“I have been seeking God about the timing of your next recording. To date, God has not confirmed His approval for Habakkuk Music to participate,” she wrote to Thomas, according to a lawsuit he filed last week in Manhattan federal court.
Thomas’ attorney, Chris Brown, said he had never seen a “God clause” invoked to end a contract.
Essex says she wasn’t ending Thomas’s contract, just waiting for a signal from above.
When Thomas decided to sign with another record company as a result of the “God” e-mail, Washington-Essex told him he had misunderstood God’s message.
“He took the statement out of context,” she said. “We just wanted time to strategize, but he just wanted to make his own recording.”
Brown says there might be another explanation.
Brown said the real reason Washington-Essex backed out of the contract was somewhat less than spiritual. She just didn’t want to pay the $30,000 advance that would accompany a second album, he said.
Thomas’ first album with Habakkuk, “The Greatest,” sold more than 12,000 copies, court records said. But Thomas also claims that Washington-Essex was un-Christian when she cheated him out of thousands of dollars in royalties and lied to him about how many records he had sold.
