The story of Fugees

Three kids from New Jersey

The Fugees story starts with two Haitian families and one very ambitious teenager. Nelust Wyclef Jean was born on the seventeenth of October 1969 in Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti, and was named after the biblical scholar John Wycliffe. Around the age of nine he moved with his family to Brooklyn, and they later settled in New Jersey, around East Orange and Newark. His father was a Nazarene minister who wanted his son in the pulpit, not on a stage. Wyclef led the choir at his father's church, his mother bought him a guitar, and years later, even with millions of records sold, he admitted his father still did not take much pride in it. He wanted Wyclef to be a minister.[1] [2] [3]

Wyclef's cousin, Prakazrel Samuel Michel, known as Pras, was born in Brooklyn on the nineteenth of October 1972 to Haitian parents and raised in Irvington, New Jersey, just outside Newark. The two boys were close as kids. Their fathers were church men who saw secular music as the devil's music, and the cousins made it anyway. Pras later described running with local gangs as a teenager, being shot at and losing friends, before music pulled him out. After a year at a rough Newark high school, his mother sent him to live with an uncle in Maplewood so he could attend the well funded Columbia High School. That move changed everything.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At Columbia High, Pras already had a plan: a hip hop act built around himself and two girls. In a dance class he heard about a younger student who could really sing. Her name was Lauryn Hill, born on the twenty sixth of May 1975 and raised in South Orange in a house full of her parents' soul records. Her older brother was in Pras's class and made the introduction, and Pras went to the Hill home to ask her mother's permission for Lauryn to join. The first line up was a trio called Tyme, with Pras, Lauryn and a friend named Marcy Harriell, who later became a Broadway actress.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Wyclef had his own group at the time, called Exact Change. The way he told it in 1996, he sat in on one of Pras and Lauryn's studio sessions and was so impressed that he joined, and by 1990 Marcy had left. The new group rhymed in several languages, so they called themselves the Tranzlator Crew. They played local showcases and high school talent shows, backed by a live band that included Wyclef's cousin Jerry Duplessis on bass. Lauryn was a singer first. She learned to rap by studying male MCs like Ice Cube rather than the female stars of the day, and she later joked that she did her homework in the bathroom stalls of hip hop clubs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A shaky debut

While the group was still unsigned, Lauryn was building an acting career. In 1991 she landed a recurring role on the soap opera As the World Turns, and in 1993 she co-starred with Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act 2, singing His Eye Is on the Sparrow. She used some of that acting money to keep the group going before they had a deal. In 1993 the trio signed with Ruffhouse Records, a label run by Chris Schwartz and Joe Nicolo through Columbia. With the deal came a new name. They became the Fugees, short for refugees, a word often thrown at Haitian Americans as an insult. They decided to wear it with pride.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Their first album was made under the guidance of Ronald Bell, also known as Khalis Bayyan, the Kool and the Gang musician behind songs like Celebration. It was recorded in 1992 and 1993 at the House of Music studio in West Orange, New Jersey. A dispute with the label held it back, and Blunted on Reality finally came out in early 1994. The members later said they had handed the producers too much control. According to one account, their management also pushed them toward a tougher gangsta rap attitude. Even so, her solo spot on a track called Some Seek Stardom showed critics exactly who the future star was.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The album flopped. It reached number sixty two on the R and B album chart, and before The Score arrived it had sold an estimated twelve thousand copies. By the summer of 1994 the Fugees were in real danger of being dropped. What saved them was a remix. The producer Salaam Remi reworked their single Nappy Heads, and his version reached number forty nine on the Billboard Hot 100, their first appearance on that chart. The Nappy Heads video was shot on the library steps at Columbia University, where Lauryn was studying at the time. She was juggling classes, film roles and a rap group all at once.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

There were still signs of what was coming. The photographer Lisa Leone was on a Harlem rooftop for the shoot of their single Vocab and caught Wyclef playing guitar with his eyes closed while Lauryn sat beside him, a quiet picture that later became famous. After the cameras moved down to the street, kids from the neighbourhood opened a fire hydrant and the shoot turned into a block party, with little security and a crowd of locals joining in. It was a gentler, more musical side of the group than the album's sales suggested. A photograph of the group from 1994 is now held in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.[1] [2]

The Booga Basement

The man who gave the Fugees a second chance was Chris Schwartz, the head of Ruffhouse. In early 1995 he handed them an advance of about one hundred and thirty five thousand dollars and, crucially, complete artistic control. Instead of renting expensive studio time, they spent the money on equipment and built a studio in the basement of a house belonging to Wyclef's uncle in New Jersey. They called it the Booga Basement. It became the headquarters of their wider crew, the Refugee Camp, a circle that included the young producer and rapper John Forté, the rapper Rah Digga and a very young Akon.[1] [2] [3]

The spark for the new album came out of a session with Salaam Remi. He played them a beat he had built for the rapper Fat Joe, around a Ramsey Lewis sample. Lauryn and Wyclef asked to hear the Fat Joe beat, and Wyclef jumped up and delivered the opening verse on the spot. Lauryn found the hook by riffing until she landed on Teena Marie's 1988 hit Ooo La La La. The result was Fu-Gee-La, and Remi said much of the album's mood was built around it. Released in December 1995, it reached number twenty nine on the Hot 100, which remains the group's highest placing on that chart.[1] [2] [3]

Recording ran from June to November 1995 at what Wyclef called a relaxed pace, with no clock ticking and no executives in the room. Each member had a role. Wyclef was the trained musician, on guitar and keyboards. Lauryn was the finest singer and, many argued, the finest rapper of the three. Pras was the business mind and de facto manager, and it was Pras who had secured the record deal in the first place. Lauryn described the finished record as an audio film, a story with cuts and breaks, and compared it to what the Who had done with Tommy. The title track even samples pieces of every other song on the album.[1] [2] [3]

The Score was released on the thirteenth of February 1996. It entered the Billboard album chart at number twelve with little fanfare, then kept climbing as radio stations picked up songs that had not even been sent to them as singles. By late May it had knocked Hootie and the Blowfish off the top spot, and it would sit in the top ten for more than half a year. It topped the R and B album chart for eight weeks, a record run for a hip hop group, and finished 1996 as the year's top R and B and hip hop album and the third best selling album of the year in America. Critics were almost as excited as the fans.[1] [2] [3]

Killing Me Softly and Ready or Not

The song that turned the Fugees into global stars was a cover, and it was the last thing they recorded for the album. Pras suggested Killing Me Softly with His Song, the ballad Roberta Flack took to number one in 1973, written by Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel. The Fugees first wanted to rewrite the words, but the writers refused, so they recorded it straight. They built the beat on a loop from A Tribe Called Quest's Bonita Applebum and added a heavy reggae bass drop. Lauryn's lead vocal did the rest. Rolling Stone later singled out her voice as the reason the song was everywhere.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In America the label never released Killing Me Softly as a commercial single, so under the chart rules of the time it could not appear on the Hot 100. People had to buy the album to own it, and millions did. It still reached number two on the Hot 100 Airplay chart. Abroad it was a monster. It went to number one in about twenty countries, became the best selling single of 1996 in Britain, broke the UK record for radio plays in a single week, and became the first single ever to debut at number one in Germany. At one point it was pulled from British shops while still in the top twenty, to clear the way for the next single.[1] [2]

The video, directed by Aswad Ayinde from Lauryn's ideas, shows the trio at a cinema, and Roberta Flack herself makes a cameo. It won the MTV Video Music Award for Best R and B Video. Flack embraced the new version completely. Its success pushed her own 1970s recording back into clubs through a 1996 remix, which topped Billboard's dance club chart, and she and the Fugees went on to perform the song together. Nearly thirty years later, when Flack died in February 2025, Lauryn and Wyclef sang it at her memorial service at Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York, with Stevie Wonder joining on harmonica.[1] [2] [3]

The third single, Ready or Not, borrowed its chorus from the Delfonics' 1968 soul hit, an idea from Wyclef. Underneath it sat a haunting loop from Boadicea, a track by the Irish singer Enya that had been used in the Stephen King film Sleepwalkers. Nobody had cleared that sample. Enya's camp came close to suing before a settlement gave her credit and royalties, and the group has thanked her ever since. The video, directed by Marcus Nispel, had submarines, helicopters, sharks and explosions and reportedly cost about one point three million dollars, often called the first rap video with a seven figure budget. The song gave them a second UK number one.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The fourth single was Bob Marley's No Woman, No Cry, with Wyclef on lead vocal. He moved the setting from Trenchtown in Kingston to Brooklyn, and Marley's own children Stephen and Sharon Marley sang uncredited backing vocals. It topped the chart in New Zealand and reached number two in Britain. By the end of the run The Score had sold an estimated twenty two million copies worldwide. In America it was certified seven times platinum, and in France it was certified diamond. For a time it was the best selling hip hop album ever made, and it is still the biggest album by a hip hop group.[1] [2]

Fugee-mania, Haiti and the Grammys

Fame arrived fast and strangely. In the summer of 1996 Lauryn, then twenty one, was still living in her parents' modest house in South Orange, driving a Rolling Stone reporter around in her mother's car. She organised a free outdoor charity festival in Harlem called Hoodshock, founded a youth charity called the Refugee Project, and the group was lined up to headline a big summer package tour. The live show was a big part of the appeal. They switched between English and Haitian Creole, toasted like Jamaican sound system DJs, and Wyclef played screaming guitar solos. At one New York show, Pras even played guitar with his teeth, Hendrix style.[1] [2] [3]

They kept releasing music at a furious rate. In late 1996 came Bootleg Versions, a remix collection. They recorded Rumble in the Jungle with A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes and John Forté for When We Were Kings, the Oscar winning documentary about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, built around a loop from ABBA's The Name of the Game. They also did a dancehall collaboration with Bounty Killer called Hip-Hopera, and Wyclef and his Refugee Camp crew remixed Michael Jackson's Blood on the Dance Floor and 2 Bad. The Fugees also picked up a Brit Award in Britain, where they had become enormous.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

At the Grammy Awards in February 1997, The Score was nominated for Album of the Year. It was only the second rap album ever nominated in that category, after MC Hammer's Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em, and the first by a hip hop group. It did not win the top prize, but the Fugees took home two Grammys, Best Rap Album and Best R and B Performance by a Duo or Group for Killing Me Softly. Lauryn became the first woman to win the rap album award. For a group that had nearly been dropped less than three years earlier, it was a remarkable turnaround.[1] [2] [3]

In April 1997 the Fugees went to Haiti for a benefit concert in Port-au-Prince, raising money for orphans and returned refugees. They were greeted like heroes at the airport, met President René Préval at the palace and toured a home for street children with former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. On the night, about seventy five thousand people packed the waterfront, the biggest staged concert the country had ever seen. It was chaotic. Wyclef talked for long stretches and kept stopping to film video takes, Pras left early, and Lauryn, five months pregnant, retreated backstage. Part of a dock collapsed, though no serious injuries were reported, and the night ended with Wyclef dancing with the president.[1] [2] [3]

A secret affair and a split

Behind the success, the group was falling apart. Wyclef and Lauryn had begun a romantic relationship around 1992 and kept it secret. In 1994 Wyclef married the designer Marie Claudinette, yet he and Lauryn carried on seeing each other. By Wyclef's own later account, his wife once told him to choose between them while the three of them were riding in Lauryn's car. When the affair broke down during the making of The Score, Pras says Lauryn left the group for a while. The pair reconciled on tour, but the tension never went away, and it shaped the music they made together and apart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In the summer of 1996 Lauryn met Rohan Marley, a son of Bob Marley and a former University of Miami linebacker. Their first child, Zion David, was born on the third of August 1997. Years later, in his 2012 memoir Purpose, Wyclef wrote that Lauryn had led him to believe the baby was his, and that he could not forgive it. Other accounts put the break down more to his marriage and the affair itself. Either way, the damage was done. Lauryn and Rohan went on to have five children together, although they never legally married.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1997 the members turned to solo work. Wyclef released The Carnival in June, a record steeped in Haitian music with songs in Creole, and both Lauryn and Pras appeared on it. It went double platinum. Pras scored a worldwide hit in 1998 with Ghetto Supastar, featuring Ol' Dirty Bastard and Mýa, built on the melody of Islands in the Stream and produced with Wyclef for the film Bulworth. It reached number two in Britain. By September 1998 their label admitted the three had not been in the same room for more than a year. Then Lauryn released The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Wyclef had at first opposed Lauryn making a solo album, then offered to produce it, and she turned him down. Miseducation became one of the most acclaimed records of the decade, and several songs were read as bitter reflections on her time with the Fugees and on Wyclef. It won five Grammys in 1999, including Album of the Year. Her solo story is its own chapter, but for the Fugees it meant any quick follow up to The Score was finished. Wyclef became a sought after producer for Whitney Houston, Destiny's Child and Santana, while Pras moved toward acting.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Refugee Camp circle was hit by tragedy of a different kind. In 2000, John Forté, the gifted Brooklyn rapper and violinist who had co-produced songs on The Score while still barely out of prep school, was arrested at Newark airport with a briefcase of liquid cocaine valued at about one point four million dollars. He was convicted and given the mandatory minimum sentence of fourteen years. The singer Carly Simon, whose son Ben Taylor had been at school with him, campaigned for his release, and in November 2008 President George W. Bush commuted his sentence. He walked free in December 2008 after about seven years inside.[1] [2] [3]

Block Party and a reunion that collapsed

For years the three sniped at each other in public. In 2003 Pras told Rolling Stone that Wyclef was the cancer of the Fugees, the reason it had broken and the reason it could not be fixed. Lauryn, by then largely withdrawn from public life, answered an interview request by saying she would only talk to outlets that paid her properly for her time. A Greatest Hits collection came out that March. Then, in September 2004, came a surprise. Dave Chappelle was organising a free concert in Brooklyn for a film by Michel Gondry, and Lauryn could not perform solo because of her record contract. She suggested the Fugees instead.[1] [2] [3]

On the eighteenth of September 2004, in pouring rain in Bedford Stuyvesant, the Fugees played together for the first time since 1997. The bill included Kanye West, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, the Roots, Mos Def and Talib Kweli, but the reunion was the moment everyone remembered. Lauryn skipped on stage in heels and a sideways Yankees cap and sang Killing Me Softly almost a cappella. When the crowd shouted to ask where she had been, she pointed to her child backstage and said that was where. The concert became the film Dave Chappelle's Block Party, released in March 2006.[1] [2] [3]

The momentum carried on. On the twenty eighth of June 2005 the Fugees opened the BET Awards in Los Angeles with an unannounced set of Ready or Not, Fu-Gee-La and Killing Me Softly, their first televised appearance in nearly ten years. Pras promised Rolling Stone a new album with a true Fugee vibe. In September 2005 they released Take It Easy, their first new single in about nine years, through the iTunes store. It reached number forty on Billboard's R and B chart. From late November to late December they toured Europe, their first tour together since 1997, and in February 2006 they played a free show in Hollywood for about eight thousand fans.[1] [2] [3]

The album never happened. Recording sessions were full of arguments, and Lauryn reportedly insisted on being addressed as Ms. Hill. In 2007 Pras told Billboard that the album was dead. He said he and Wyclef were on the same page but Lauryn was in her own zone, and he was fed up. He later added that you would sooner see Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush sharing a latte in Starbucks than another Fugees reunion. Wyclef told Blues and Soul that the reunion shows should never have happened because they were not ready, and that Lauryn needed help. Lauryn, for her part, had described the group in 2005 as a system built to control her.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Separate roads

Wyclef's solo career kept rolling. In 2006 he featured on Shakira's Hips Don't Lie, which went to number one in more than fifty countries, and he wrote and produced for other stars. His bigger passion became Haiti. In 2001 he had set up a charity, Yéle Haiti, named after one of his Creole songs. After the devastating earthquake of January 2010, which killed an estimated two hundred and thirty thousand people, Yéle raised more than a million dollars in a day. In August 2010 he announced on CNN that he was running for president of Haiti, but the electoral council ruled him ineligible because he had not lived in the country for five years.[1] [2] [3]

Yéle then collapsed in scandal. The New York Times reported that it had failed to file tax returns for years, and about half of the more than nine million dollars it spent in 2010 went on travel for Wyclef and his entourage, consultants' fees and real estate costs. The charity closed in 2012, and the New York attorney general said it had made improper payments to Wyclef, his relatives and associates. Wyclef always denied using the money for personal gain. Meanwhile Lauryn faced her own trouble. In 2013 she served three months in federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, for failing to file taxes on income earned years earlier.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pras took a different path. In 2006 he spent nine days living undercover as a homeless man on Skid Row in Los Angeles for a documentary, an idea he said came up during a game of Scrabble. He became fascinated by a young politician named Barack Obama, whom he had met when Obama was still an Illinois state senator, and in 2007 he was invited to a star studded Hollywood fundraiser. Around the same time he met a young Malaysian financier named Low Taek Jho, known as Jho Low, at a Manhattan nightclub, where Pras reckoned Low spent a million and a half dollars on drinks in twenty minutes. It was the beginning of his downfall.[1] [2] [3]

Every few years a Fugees rumour flared up and died. In July 2017 the New York DJ Funkmaster Flex played an unreleased Fugees song on Hot 97, and both Lauryn and Wyclef quickly disowned it as an old studio leftover they had not approved. In 2018 Wyclef told the same station that the group had been offered ninety million dollars for a tour and that he and Lauryn had turned it down. Pras was furious, saying he wanted nothing more to do with the Fugees. Wyclef, meanwhile, was also handcuffed by Los Angeles County deputies in 2017 in a case of mistaken identity, and the sheriff's department apologised.[1] [2] [3]

Reunions and courtrooms

In November 2018 federal authorities seized about seventy four million dollars from Pras's bank accounts, and in May 2019 he was indicted. Prosecutors said that in 2012 Jho Low, who was accused of stealing billions from a Malaysian state fund called 1MDB, sent more than twenty one million dollars to accounts linked to Pras, and that Pras paid about twenty straw donors to funnel foreign money into Barack Obama's re-election campaign. In 2021 new charges followed. Prosecutors said Pras later lobbied the Trump administration to drop the 1MDB investigation and to send a Chinese dissident, Guo Wengui, back to China. Pras pleaded not guilty and turned down a plea deal.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That same autumn the Fugees announced a reunion tour for the twenty fifth anniversary of The Score. Lauryn said she wanted to set an example of reconciliation. On the twenty second of September 2021 they played a secret show on the rooftop at Pier 17 in New York for Global Citizen, their first show together in fifteen years. Fans had to hand over their phones, and the trio walked on about three and a half hours late. The tour was postponed, and in January 2022 it was cancelled, officially because of Covid. With Pras under indictment, a former federal prosecutor had already told Billboard it was almost inconceivable that a judge would let him tour abroad.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Pras's trial opened in Washington in the spring of 2023. The actor Leonardo DiCaprio testified about Jho Low's lavish world, and so did the former attorney general Jeff Sessions. Pras took the stand and said Low simply wanted a photograph with Obama and that nobody told him the donations were illegal. On the twenty sixth of April 2023 the jury convicted him on all ten counts, including conspiracy, witness tampering, money laundering and acting as an unregistered agent of China. His new lawyers later claimed his trial attorney, David Kenner, had used an experimental artificial intelligence program to draft the closing argument. The judge refused a new trial.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Remarkably, the Fugees still got back on stage. In June 2023 all three reunited at the Roots Picnic festival, and that year Pras and Wyclef joined Lauryn at shows on her Miseducation anniversary tour, including a homecoming night in Newark. But Lauryn was fighting serious vocal strain and taking the steroid prednisone to get through, and in November 2023 the rest of the run was postponed. In April 2024 Wyclef joined her for a mini reunion at Coachella, during the set by her son YG Marley. Then, in August 2024, the whole American leg of their tour was cancelled three days before the opening night in Tampa, amid weak ticket sales.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The fallout was ugly. Lauryn blamed clickbait headlines and her earlier injury for the poor sales. Pras released a diss track called Bar Mitzfa aimed squarely at her punctuality. In October 2024 he sued her for fraud and breach of contract, accusing her of planning to take sixty percent of the tour money and leaving him twenty. Lauryn called the suit baseless and said Pras had been over advanced money to help with his legal bills. Days later she and Wyclef played the European dates without him. In Cardiff, a Guardian critic noted that when Wyclef walked on for the Fugees songs, the two of them seemed like kids again.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A prison sentence and a farewell

On the twentieth of November 2025, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced Pras Michel to fourteen years in federal prison. Prosecutors had argued that the sentencing guidelines pointed toward life, and said he had betrayed his country for money and lied without apology to carry out his schemes. His lawyers had asked for three years and called the sentence completely disproportionate. It was a stunning fall for the man who had once been the group's business brain. Pras filed an appeal, arguing that the jury had been improperly influenced and that his trial had been unfair, and he asked to remain free while the appeal was heard.[1] [2] [3]

Then the wider Fugees family suffered a loss. On the twelfth of January 2026, John Forté was found dead at his home in Chilmark, on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. He was fifty. Police said there was no sign of foul play. After his release from prison he had rebuilt his life as a musician, teacher and father, and in 2023 he joined Lauryn on stage at her Newark show as if no time had passed. Wyclef called him his refugee brother. Pras said he had lost a brother, and Lauryn remembered a gentle soul who was part Brownsville and part prep school.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A few weeks later came the most moving moment in years. At the sixty eighth Grammy Awards on the first of February 2026, Lauryn led the In Memoriam tribute, her first Grammy performance since 1999. She honoured D'Angelo, who had died the previous autumn, with their duet Nothing Even Matters, then turned to Roberta Flack. For the finale, Wyclef joined her on guitar, and the two sang Killing Me Softly With His Song, moving from Flack's original arrangement into the Fugees version, backed by an all star cast that included John Legend, Chaka Khan and Jon Batiste. The room erupted.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 2026 the judge refused to let Pras stay free during his appeal, though she pushed his surrender date back, and it was later delayed again. On the thirtieth of April 2026 he reported to the federal prison in Safford, Arizona, to begin his fourteen year sentence. His spokesperson said it was a painful day but not the final chapter, and that the appeal would be fought from the inside. The group he had helped found, meanwhile, carried on as a duo whenever Lauryn and Wyclef chose to share a stage.[1] [2] [3]

As of 2026 the Fugees have released only two studio albums, and The Score has never had a follow up. Its reach is enormous all the same. Bono called them hip hop's version of the Beatles. Barack Obama named Ready or Not his favourite song during his 2008 campaign, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame lists it among the songs that shaped rock. Lin-Manuel Miranda's song Helpless from Hamilton was inspired by it. Rolling Stone ranks The Score among the five hundred greatest albums of all time. And the Fugees proved that a record about refugees, full of Haitian pride, could conquer the world.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Fugees

Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill. The creative heart of the Fugees and its deepest wound. Wyclef helped teach Lauryn to rap, then admitted her skills outgrew his. Their secret affair ran through his 1994 marriage and the making of The Score, and its collapse fed the breakup, bitter solo songs and a memoir she never endorsed. Decades later they still share stages, most movingly at the 2026 Grammys.[1] [2] [3]

Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel. Cousins whose fathers were church officials who frowned on secular music, and close friends since childhood. They share Haitian roots and both went into Haitian politics. Pras once called Wyclef the cancer of the group, and later sided with him against Lauryn. When Pras's legal troubles deepened, it was Wyclef and Lauryn who kept performing the Fugees songs without him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pras Michel and Lauryn Hill. Pras recruited Lauryn as a schoolgirl, asking her mother for permission. Thirty years later they were enemies. He called her unreliable, released a diss track about her lateness and in 2024 sued her for fraud over tour money. She called the suit baseless and said she had lent him money. He went to prison in 2026 with the dispute unresolved in public.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lauryn Hill and Rohan Marley. Lauryn met Bob Marley's son Rohan, a former University of Miami football player, in 1996 while still involved with Wyclef. Their son Zion was born in 1997, and they had five children together, including the singer YG Marley, but never married. They lived apart for much of their relationship, which ended around 2009.[1] [2]

Wyclef Jean and Jerry Duplessis. Wyclef's cousin Jerry Duplessis, later known as Jerry Wonda, was raised partly by Wyclef's mother after arriving from Haiti at sixteen, and played bass in the early band. He co-produced The Score in the Booga Basement, and with Wyclef went on to produce Santana's Maria Maria and Shakira's Hips Don't Lie.[1] [2] [3]

Fugees and Salaam Remi. The Queens producer rescued the group's career with his remix of Nappy Heads, which gave them their first Hot 100 entry, then produced Fu-Gee-La from a beat first made for Fat Joe. He later became famous for his work with Amy Winehouse and Nas.[1] [2] [3]

Fugees and Chris Schwartz. The co-founder of Ruffhouse Records signed the trio in 1993 and, after their debut flopped, took a gamble in 1995 by giving them an advance of about a hundred and thirty five thousand dollars and total creative control. The Score repaid him many times over and helped turn Ruffhouse into a major force.[1] [2] [3]

Fugees and John Forté. The young Brooklyn violinist and rapper was introduced to the group through Lauryn, by most accounts, and joined the Refugee Camp. He co-produced tracks on The Score and earned a Grammy nomination at twenty one. After his drug conviction and years in prison, the group stayed in touch, and all three mourned him as a brother when he died in January 2026.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fugees and Roberta Flack. The Fugees' version of Flack's Killing Me Softly made them stars, and Flack answered with generosity, appearing in their video, remixing her own recording and performing the song with them. When she died in 2025, Lauryn and Wyclef sang it at her memorial and again at the 2026 Grammys.[1] [2] [3]

Pras Michel and Jho Low. Pras met the Malaysian financier at a Manhattan nightclub in 2006. In 2012 Low sent him more than twenty million dollars, which prosecutors said was stolen from Malaysia's 1MDB fund and partly funnelled into Obama's campaign. As of 2026 Low was still at large, while the relationship sent Pras to prison for fourteen years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Wyclef Jean and Marie Claudinette Jean. Wyclef married the designer in 1994, while his relationship with Lauryn continued in secret. By his own account she once told him to choose between them. The marriage survived. They adopted a daughter, Angelina, in 2005 and renewed their vows in 2009.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Fugees

• The beat for Fu-Gee-La was originally made for the rapper Fat Joe. Salaam Remi played the Fat Joe beat during a session, and Wyclef jumped up and freestyled the opening verse on the spot. Lauryn then found the hook by riffing until she landed on a Teena Marie melody.[1] [2]
• The Fu-Gee-La video was shot in Jamaica as a tribute to the film The Harder They Come. The group wanted to recreate Jimmy Cliff's 1972 crime classic, with each member playing a role in a robbery story. Fu-Gee-La remains their highest charting single on the Hot 100, at number twenty nine.[1]
• A very young Akon sings, uncredited, on the Sly and Robbie remix of Fu-Gee-La. The remix appears as a bonus track on most versions of The Score. Akon was part of the wider Refugee Camp circle around the Booga Basement.[1] [2] [3]
• Killing Me Softly was the last song the Fugees recorded for The Score. It was Pras's idea to cover it. Wyclef was not convinced it should be a single, but radio stations pushed it anyway, and it became their biggest hit.[1] [2]
• Killing Me Softly was the first single ever to debut at number one in Germany. It was also the best selling single of 1996 in Germany, Britain, Belgium, Iceland and the Netherlands, and broke the UK record for radio plays in a single week.[1]
• The Fugees' Killing Me Softly was never sold as a single in America. Chart rules of the time meant it could not enter the Hot 100, so fans had to buy the whole album to own it. Critics later called it a calculated move by the label.[1] [2]
• The haunting loop in Ready or Not came from an Enya track used in a Stephen King horror film. Enya's Boadicea had been used in the 1992 film Sleepwalkers, making Ready or Not one of the earliest rap hits to sample a horror soundtrack.[1] [2]
• In 1996 Intel built an interactive video game inspired by the Ready or Not video. The video itself, directed by Marcus Nispel, reportedly cost about one point three million dollars. Pras defended the cost, saying fans who paid for a CD deserved a spectacular video.[1]
• Barack Obama named Ready or Not his favourite song during the 2008 campaign. The list appeared in Blender magazine. John McCain's top pick, Rolling Stone noted, was ABBA's Dancing Queen. Pras had become an early Obama supporter.[1] [2]
• Lin-Manuel Miranda's song Helpless, from the musical Hamilton, was inspired by Ready or Not. The Fugees track has been sampled and reworked by artists from Diddy and Mario Winans to The Weeknd, Meek Mill and Bastille.[1]
• The title track of The Score contains snippets from every other song on the album. Lauryn described the record as an audio film, even comparing it to what the Who did with Tommy. The veteran DJ Red Alert introduces the album like film credits.[1] [2]
• Pras was accepted by both Yale and Rutgers, and chose Rutgers. In 1996 he told the Los Angeles Times he had scored thirteen fifty on his SAT as a junior, despite a teenage spell running with local gangs.[1] [2]
• At a 1996 New York show, Pras played guitar with his teeth, Jimi Hendrix style. The Fugees' live sets mixed English and Haitian Creole, Jamaican style toasting, soul ballads and loud rock guitar, which surprised hip hop crowds.[1]
• Blunted on Reality had sold only about twelve thousand copies before The Score came out. By the summer of 1994 the group feared being dropped. Their label boss Chris Schwartz instead gave them creative control for the second album.[1] [2] [3]
• The Nappy Heads video was filmed on the library steps at Columbia University, where Lauryn was a student. She later left Columbia after about a year of study once The Score began selling in the millions.[1] [2]
• The Score was only the second rap album ever nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy. The first was MC Hammer's Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em. The Score was the first by a hip hop group to be nominated.[1]
• The Score is certified diamond in France. It is the best selling album by an American hip hop act in France, and remains the best selling album by any hip hop group worldwide.[1]
• At their 1997 Haiti concert, Haiti's president ran down the catwalk to stop fans climbing the scaffolding. President René Préval, with armed police behind him, succeeded. By the end of the night he was dancing arm in arm with Wyclef.[1]
• Before their 1997 Haiti visit, Wyclef had quietly sent six Creole songs to Haitian radio, and all six went to number one. He said he recorded them not to sell, but to play for the kids back home.[1]
• At the Haiti concert the Fugees shared the stage with Sweet Micky, the singer Michel Martelly, who later became president of Haiti. Pras later made a documentary about Martelly's election, called Sweet Micky for President, and Martelly awarded Wyclef Haiti's National Order of Honour and Merit.[1] [2] [3]
• The Fugees' Rumble in the Jungle is built on a loop from ABBA's The Name of the Game. It was recorded for the Oscar winning Muhammad Ali documentary When We Were Kings, with A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes and John Forté.[1] [2]
• In 1998 the Fugees reunited briefly to film a song for a Sesame Street special. The song, Just Happy to Be Me, appeared in Elmopalooza and on its Grammy winning soundtrack album.[1] [2]
• Lauryn could not play Dave Chappelle's Block Party as a solo act because of her record contract. She rang the organiser and offered the Fugees instead, which led to their first performance together since 1997.[1]
• Take It Easy, the Fugees' 2005 comeback single, was released through Apple's iTunes store. It was their first new single in about nine years and reached number forty on Billboard's R and B chart.[1] [2]
• Pras's Skid Row documentary began with a game of Scrabble. A friend suggested the idea during a game, and Pras thought he was only trying to distract him. He then lived undercover as a homeless man in Los Angeles for nine days.[1]
• Pras has said one of his uncles was murdered by another uncle in a Duvalier era political feud. He told Rolling Stone the killing, on opposite sides of Haiti's dictatorship, was how he first got into politics. The account is his own and has not been independently confirmed.[1]
• Fans at the Fugees' 2021 reunion show had to surrender their phones at the door. The rooftop show at Pier 17 in New York started about three and a half hours late, and the set lasted under an hour.[1]
• John Forté won a scholarship to study violin at Phillips Exeter Academy. He grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and loved Vivaldi. He was twenty one when he earned a Grammy nomination for his work on The Score.[1] [2]
• John Forté moved into Carly Simon's home on Martha's Vineyard in 2001, while awaiting trial. He met Simon through her son Ben Taylor's cousin, a classmate at Exeter. She campaigned for his release for years, calling him family, and he later settled on the island, where he died in 2026.[1] [2] [3]
• The Fugees turned their Booga Basement studio into a transitional home for young Haitian refugees. The basement in a New Jersey family home had been where they recorded The Score in 1995.[1] [2]
• Roberta Flack remixed her own 1970s recording of Killing Me Softly because of the Fugees' success. The 1996 remix, with new vocal flourishes from Flack, topped Billboard's dance club chart.[1]
• Wyclef was named after the biblical scholar John Wycliffe. His father was a Nazarene minister who had hoped his son would follow him into the church.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.