A judge has ordered Kodak Black, who is awaiting trial in Florida on a drug trafficking charge, into a month of rehab after the rapper allegedly tested positive for fentanyl.
The 25-year-old performer, whose real name is Bill Kapri, tested positive for the drug Feb. 8 after missing a required drug test on Feb. 3, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, prompting Broward County Judge Barbara Duffy to issue a bench warrant for his arrest.
But Kapri won’t start rehab until Tuesday, the judge allowed, so he can play the Rolling Loud California festival on the Hollywood Park grounds in Inglewood this weekend. Travis Scott, who is also dealing with his own challenges, is the headliner.
Kapri was placed under house arrest in July after being pulled over by the Florida Highway Patrol because his window tints were too dark. After allegedly smelling marijuana, police said they searched the SUV and found a bag with 31 oxycodone tablets and almost $75,000 in cash. Regular drug tests were a part of the house-arrest order.
The rapper’s attorney, Bradford Cohen, told XXL magazine at the time that Kapri’s doctor had prescribed the oxycodone so he could manage chronic pain after being shot in the foot outside a party following a Justin Bieber concert during 2022 Super Bowl weekend in Los Angeles.
At the Tuesday hearing, Cohen suggested to the judge that a “star-struck” lab technician could have mixed up Kapri’s urine sample or paperwork with another patient’s, the Miami Herald reported. However, he declined to have his client’s hair tested, which would have shown drug use over the previous 90 days.
Cohen didn’t respond immediately Wednesday to The Times’ request for additional comment.
“All the good deeds I do, all the good things I do, it never goes as viral,” Kapri said, according to the Herald. “I don’t know why [they] are so hungry to see me in jail.”
“You better get it together,” Duffy told him.
The rapper was famously freed from federal prison by former President Trump, who in January 2021 commuted Kapri’s 46-month sentence for lying on background-check paperwork related to firearms purchases in 2019. Kapri had a separate one-year term for gun possession running concurrently and was serving out his sentence at a high-security federal prison in Kentucky. Those charges stemmed from a mid-2019 arrest at the Canadian border near Niagara Falls.
Trump’s commutation noted that the rapper — who has sold more than 30 million singles since 2014 — had paid for children’s school notebooks, supplies for daycare centers and food for the hungry, and also donated $50,000 for restaurants in his hometown of Pompano Beach, Fla.
In a song celebrating his release, Kodak Black rapped, “Ran up out of prison, I ain’t say bye to nobody / I want sushi, then some coochie, no more lunch trays, yeah / Had to stop showin’ everybody where my mama stay, yeah / Trump just freed me, but my favorite president is on the money / All the hate and prejudice has become evident to me.”
In April of that year, Kapri was sentenced to 18 months’ probation in South Carolina after pleading guilty to first-degree assault of a teen. The girl said the rapper attacked her at a hotel room after the show, biting her on the neck and breast and continuing even after she told him to stop, authorities said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
