The late “Godfather of Rap” may be losing one of his children.
The daughter of legendary poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron, best known for “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” says her half-brother isn’t actually related to the late Grammy Award winner and should be excluded from his estate.
In papers filed in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court, Raquiyah Kelly-Heron, 36, says a DNA test proves that Rumal Rackley is not the Scott-Heron scion that he claims to be.
Rackley, 36, “has not been proven to be the legitimate child of (Scott-Heron), and there is in fact strong reason to believe that Rumal Rackley is not (his) child,” Kelly-Heron said in an affidavit.
She said she believes her father was “defrauded” into thinking Rackley was his child later in life, when he was actually a biological “stranger.”
Rackley did not return calls for comment, and his lawyer declined comment.
A hearing has been scheduled for later this month on Kelly-Heron’s bid to remove Rackley from the musician’s estate.
Rackley, Kelly-Heron and two other sisters have been duking it out in court since the musician died in May 2011 without a will.
Rackley was appointed administrator of the estate, a role he says Scott-Heron groomed him for.
He then filed suit against sister Gia Heron and her mother, the spoken-word poet’s first wife, Brenda Sykes, claiming they had wrongly helped themselves to $250,000 of the pianist’s cash.
That case quietly settled for an undisclosed sum in early 2013 — but there’s still plenty of bad blood to go around between the siblings, who all have different mothers.
Rackley’s mother is Lurma Rackley, who says in court papers that she “fell deeply in love” with Scott-Heron when she met him while working as reporter in Washington in 1974.
They had a two-year affair, and when Rackley discovered she was pregnant, she said, “I did not ask Gil for anything.”
She said she intentionally kept his name off Rumal’s birth certificate. “I was a modern career woman who planned to raise her child on her own,” Rackley said.
In his own affidavit, Rumal noted Scott-Heron’s 1994 album “Spirits” was dedicated to “my son Rumal and my daughters Nia and Gia,” and said his dad often “introduced me from the stage as his son.”
Kelly-Heron, in her filing, says Rackley took a DNA test in 2011 using DNA from Scott-Heron’s brother, and the results showed they “do not share a common male lineage.”
He has since refused to take another DNA test using Scott-Heron’s DNA, the filing says.
