Man Accused of Stealing Hard Drives With Unreleased Beyoncé Music Heads to Trial This Week
A Georgia man who allegedly broke into a rental car and made off with hard drives containing unreleased Beyoncé recordings and confidential tour materials is set to face a jury beginning Monday, May 11, nearly a year after the theft first made headlines and sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry.
Kelvin Evans, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him, will stand trial on a felony count of entering a motor vehicle with intent to commit theft, as well as a misdemeanor count of criminal trespassing. He turned down a plea agreement offered to him last month, opting instead to take his chances before a judge and jury. Evans could be sentenced to as many as six years behind bars.
The incident traces back to the summer of 2025, when Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter world tour was making its way through Atlanta, one of the most anticipated stops of a tour that had already generated enormous cultural buzz. Amid the logistical machinery required to execute a production of that scale, choreographer Christopher Grant and dancer Diandre Blue found themselves at the center of an alarming discovery: the trunk window of their rental vehicle had been smashed, and two suitcases were gone.
Grant and Blue promptly filed a police report, and the details it contained were striking. Grant told responding officers that he had been transporting what he described as "personal sensitive information" belonging to Beyoncé herself. Among the missing items were hard drives connected to the Atlanta leg of the tour, drives that, according to the report, held watermarked audio files, unreleased music, recorded footage, production plans for the live show, and both past and upcoming set lists.
Investigators moved relatively quickly to identify a suspect. An arrest warrant was issued roughly a week after the police report was filed, though the actual arrest did not come until August 2025. Evans was not formally named as the suspect until the following month, in September. He was subsequently released on a $20,000 bond in October while the case worked its way through the legal system.
Throughout that period, Atlanta police confirmed that none of the stolen items had been recovered, a fact that continues to hang over the case. The hard drives, the unreleased recordings, the tour documents: as of the most recent official statements, all of it remains missing.
The decision to reject the April plea deal is the most consequential move Evans has made since his arrest. Prosecutors had offered him a five-year prison sentence on the felony charge, with a concurrent 12-month term on the misdemeanor.
Beyoncé's camp has not made extensive public comments about the case since the initial incident. But the stakes for her organization are real: unreleased music finding its way into the wrong hands is one of the music industry's most persistent fears, and the fact that the drives have never been located leaves open the question of where that material may have ended up.
