Russell Simmons is getting access to valuable stock in the energy drink brand Celsius after a stranger-than-fiction legal saga that pitted the Def Jam founder against his ex-wife, her now-incarcerated second husband and the Department of Justice.
Court papers docketed on Monday (Aug. 24) and first reported by Billboard say Simmons can recover some of the nearly 10 million Celius shares that are in DOJ possession as part of the federal prosecution of Tim Leissner, a former Goldman Sachs banker and the second husband of Simmons’ ex-wife, Kimora Lee Simmons. It’s not disclosed what percentage Simmons is receiving from these shares, which are currently worth more than $350 million in total.
The filing says Simmons has promised to first use the Celsius stock to “pay certain of his creditors” before doing anything else with the money. Court records obtained by Billboard show that as of 2025, the record executive owed more than $11 million in past-due settlements to six women, some of whom have publicly accused him of sexual assault. He previously agreed to spend at least $8.6 million of the recovered Celsius shares satisfying these debts.
The legal saga dates back to 2015, when Simmons, Lee Simmons and Leissner went in together on 3.3 million Celsius shares for a total of $3 million. The investment turned out to be quite shrewd; a Celsius stock split in 2023 tripled the amount of shares, and they’ve soared in value over the last decade. When the markets closed on Tuesday (Aug. 25), Celsius was trading at $35.40 per share.
The trouble arose when Leissner was arrested on federal criminal charges in 2018 for helping orchestrate a massive Malaysian bond fraud known as the 1MDB scandal. He put the lucrative Celsius stock up for bail and ultimately forfeited the shares to pay off his financial penalties upon pleading guilty.
This set off years of litigation between Simmons, Lee Simmons, Leissner, and the DOJ over the fate of the sum. Simmons alleged his ex-wife and her new husband had conspired to steal his 49% portion of the Celsius stock, claims they deny. Lee Simmons, meanwhile, said she remained entitled to nearly 900,000 Celsius shares she’d funded with money from her modeling career and fashion line.
Meanwhile, Simmons became embroiled in his own controversy when numerous women accused him of sexual misconduct in a 2017 New York Times investigation and the 2020 HBO documentary On the Record. Simmons denies all wrongdoing, while many of these women have since hired attorneys to bring legal claims.
Though Simmons is currently fighting some allegations in court, he largely avoided a litigation onslaught by signing numerous settlements in late 2023 and early 2024. He agreed to pay a total of $10.5 million to four women who publicly accused him of raping them in the 1980s and 1990s: Tonie Sallie, Tina Klein-Baker, Sheri Abernathy and Sil Lai Abrams, according to court filings.
Court records also show that around the same time, Simmons agreed to pay two other women, Alexia Jones and Wendy Franco, a combined $800,000 in settlements for undisclosed claims. But the Def Jam founder never delivered the bulk of the promised payments; according to the filings, in 2025 he still owed more than $11 million in total to those six women.
Last fall, as Simmons was hammering out a deal with the DOJ to recover a slice of the Celsius shares, he signed a series of new agreements with some of the claimants vowing to carve out a portion of the stock recovery to satisfy their debts. Specifically, four October agreements docketed in court allocated $5.7 million from the Celsius shares to Klein-Baker, $512,000 to Franco, and $1.2 million each to Abernathy and Abrams. It’s not clear whether Simmons signed similar follow-up agreements with Sallie or Jones.
Reps for Simmons and the six claimants all either declined to comment or did not return inquiries as to whether or how much these women will now be paid.
As for the rest of the Celsius shares not recovered by Simmons, Lee Simmons is also getting back an undisclosed amount of the stock per Monday’s DOJ filing. A longtime friend and investment partner of Leissner’s is getting another slice of shares, and the federal government will keep the rest as criminal forfeiture proceeds. Leissner, who is now serving a two-year prison sentence and in the midst of divorcing Lee Simmons, gets nothing.
