Lawsuit
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Lawyers for Sean “Diddy” Combs pushed back against a woman’s lawsuit that accused him of sexual assault, filing a motion on Friday (April 26) to dismiss some claims that were not under law when the alleged incident occurred.
The motion filed in a New York court claims Combs cannot be sued because certain laws didn’t exist when Joi Dickerson-Deal made the allegations against him in 1991.
The music mogul’s lawyers want certain statues from Dickerson-Deal’s claims such as revenge porn and human trafficking to be dismissed with prejudice.
In a filing last year, she said Combs “intentionally drugged” her then brought her home and sexually assaulted her after a date in Harlem when she was a 19-year-old college student.
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Without her knowledge, Combs videotaped the assault and later shared it with several friends in the music industry, the suit alleges. He denied the allegations, accusing her of seeking to exploit the New York law that temporarily extended the statute of limitations.
Dickerson-Deal’s claim came nearly three decades after his alleged misconduct and the New York State Revenge Porn Law was not codified until 2019, Combs’ lawyers said.
His attorneys also pointed out a few others including the New York Services for Victims of Human Trafficking Law, which came into effect in 2007.
The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly, as Dickerson has done.
Last month, Combs’ properties in Los Angeles and Miami were raided by federal authorities in a sex trafficking investigation. The criminal investigation is a major escalation in the scrutiny of Combs, who has been the defendant in several recent sexual abuse lawsuits.
In a lawsuit Combs settled the day after it was filed in November, his former protege and girlfriend, the R&B singer Cassie, sued him alleging years of sexual abuse, including rape. The lawsuit said he forced her to have sex with male prostitutes while he filmed them.
In February, a music producer filed a lawsuit alleging Combs coerced him to solicit prostitutes and pressured him to have sex with them.
Another of Combs’ accusers was a woman who said he raped her two decades ago when she was 17.
Combs and his attorneys have denied all of the allegations in the lawsuits.
A superfan accused of hacking Kelsea Ballerini and leaking her unreleased music has reached an agreement with the star’s lawyers not to share her songs with anyone else — and to name any people he’s already sent them to.
Just a week after Ballerini sued Bo Ewing over accusations that he illegally accessed her unfinished album and shared it with members of a fan club, attorneys for both sides said Wednesday (April 24) that they have agreed on a preliminary injunction against Ewing that will remain in place as the case plays out.
Under the terms of the injunction to which his lawyers agreed, Ewing is not only banned from disseminating any of Ballerini’s materials, he’s required to divulge who he has already shared them with and how he came into possession of her music.
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“Defendant shall, within thirty days of entry of this order, provide plaintiffs with the names and contact information for all people to whom defendant disseminated the recordings,” the agreement reads. “Defendant shall use his best efforts to disclose to Plaintiffs from whom and by what means he obtained the recordings.”
The agreement avoids a court battle over such an injunction, which Ballerini’s attorneys were asking a federal judge to impose regardless of Ewing’s cooperation. In doing so, they warned that the hack had caused “immediate and ongoing harm” that would get far worse if Ewing was allowed to widely release the allegedly leaked songs online.
“The most critical time for an album’s success is its initial release date,” Ballerini’s attorneys wrote in a motion demanding such an injunction. “Hacks like this substantially diminish both performers’ and labels’ ability to realize the full benefits of the release because the work is already available for download, for free, at the time of the official release.”
Ballerini sued last week, claiming that Ewing — allegedly a former fan who had become disillusioned with the star — had gained illegal “back-door access” to a device holding recordings of 12 songs still in production. Her lawyers say he then shared them with members of an online fan club.
“Because the recordings are not the completed master, the songs are not final and are subject to revision,” her lawyers wrote. “Ms. Ballerini and her team are the only people who can say when the recordings are complete. Defendant’s actions have stripped plaintiffs of that right and caused the distribution of unfinished work that may not yet be up to plaintiffs’ high professional standards.”
Almost immediately, the federal judge overseeing the case issued a so-called temporary restraining order — an emergency order that banned Ewing from sharing any of Ballerini’s materials. That order set the stage for a longer-term preliminary injunction, which both sides were set to debate at a hearing on Thursday (April 25).
Instead, Ewing’s attorneys struck Wednesday’s deal accepting such an injunction. Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. signed off on the agreement on Thursday. Neither side’s lawyers immediately returned requests for comment.
Megan Thee Stallion and Roc Nation are facing a lawsuit from a cameraman who claims he was forced to watch her have sex with a woman inside a moving vehicle while she was on tour in Spain.
In a complaint filed Tuesday (April 23) in Los Angeles court, Emilio Garcia accused the superstar of subjecting him to a hostile work environment due to the alleged incident, which he says amounted to harassment that left him “embarrassed, mortified and offended.”
“After a night out, plaintiff Stallion and three other women were riding in a SUV together,” Garcia’s lawyers write in the lawsuit, obtained by Billboard. “Suddenly, Stallion and one of the other women start having sex right beside plaintiff. Plaintiff could not get out of the car as it was both moving and he was in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country.”
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Garcia claims that the day after the incident — which allegedly occurred in June 2022 near Ibiza, Spain — Megan told him, “Don’t ever discuss what you saw.” He says she then “berated him” and made “fat-shaming comments” towards him.
In the months following the alleged incident, Garcia claims that Roc Nation switched him from a monthly rate to a per-assignment arrangement. He says he also “noticed a change in how he was treated and saw a decrease in the number of bookings he received from Stallion.” In June 2023, he claims he was told that he was told that “his services would no longer be required.”
Beyond the allegations of a hostile workplace, Garcia also claims that Megan and Roc Nation violated California wage-and-hour laws by failing to fully pay him for the “myriad” tasks he performed for the superstar as her personal cameraman: “More than once, Stallion interrupted plaintiff during dinner and demanded that he immediately shift his focus to assist with her TikTok creative ideas.”
Despite his status as an independent contractor, Garcia claims that Megan effectively treated him like an employee. He says she repeatedly told him explicitly that he was “not allowed to service any other client other than herself.”
Notably, Garcia is represented by the same attorneys (Neama Rahmani and Ronald Zambrano) who filed a high-profile hostile workplace case against Lizzo on behalf of three of her backup dancers. Like the new case, that earlier lawsuit also features allegations that employees were forced to watch sex acts in a European country during an overseas tour.
A rep for Megan and Roc Nation did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday.
Pandora is firing back at a lawsuit filed by the Mechanical Licensing Collective (the MLC) that claims the company has failed to properly pay streaming royalties, calling the case a “gross overreach” based on a “legally incoherent position.”
The MLC — the group created by Congress in 2018 to collect streaming royalties — filed the lawsuit earlier this year, accusing Pandora (a unit of SiriusXM) of misclassifying the nature of its streaming service to avoid paying the kind of higher royalties owed by “interactive” platforms like Spotify.
But in its first response to the case filed on Tuesday (April 16), Pandora calls the MLC’s lawsuit a “wild overreach” that “distorts the Pandora experience” — and one filed by an entity that is not even legally empowered to bring such cases.
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“The MLC … was intended to be a neutral intermediary charged with collecting and distributing royalties under the blanket license,” Pandora writes. “It is not authorized to play judge and jury over a streaming service’s legal compliance, nor was it created … to pursue legal frolics and detours such as this one.”
Pandora’s lawyers also say the lawsuit is based on a “a legally incoherent position” that has never been raised by the music companies for whom the MLC is collecting royalties: “The MLC seems to think it knows something the entire music industry does not.”
A rep for the MLC did not immediately return a request for comment.
At the heart of the lawsuit against Pandora is the distinction between “interactive” platforms like Spotify or Apple Music, which allow users to pick their songs on demand, and “noninteractive” platforms that provide an experience more like radio. It’s a key dividing line since interactive and noninteractive services pay very different royalties under different systems.
Though Pandora offers a premium tier with on-demand functionality, it has long treated Pandora Free — the core radio-like product that fueled the company’s rise in the late 2000s — as a noninteractive service, since it largely serves users a mix of songs based on their preferences.
But in a February lawsuit, the MLC argued that Pandora Free had crossed the line into “interactive” status by offering so-called “Sponsored Premium Access” sessions, which allow users to briefly play specific songs in return for watching ads. As a result, the MLC argued that Pandora owed the same kind of royalties for Pandora Free as services like YouTube or Spotify pay.
“Pandora provides even greater interactive access and functionality than these other ad-supported interactive streaming services,” the MLC wrote. “Despite the interactive functionality of Pandora Free, Pandora has failed to report in full Pandora Free usage to The MLC.”
In Tuesday’s response, Pandora’s lawyers argued that the MLC’s lawsuit “badly distorts reality” by making a “blatant mischaracterization of Pandora’s offerings.”
In their telling, the disputed “Sponsored Premium Access” sessions are merely brief previews of the company’s on-demand tier with “strict caps” on usage — not a wholesale feature that would “transform” Pandora Free “into an interactive service like Spotify or Apple Music.”
What’s more, Pandora says that feature was explicitly negotiated with music companies, who have never once objected to it or argued that it required Pandora to “fundamentally change its approach to licensing.”
“The MLC apparently thinks it knows better than the entire music publishing industry,” Pandora wrote. “Not only is the MLC operating far outside its administrative bounds, but it is also completely wrong on the law.”
Speaking with Billboard on Tuesday, George White, senior vp of music licensing at SiriusXM and Pandora, echoed the claims made by Pandora in the legal response.
“The lawsuit is really a gross overreach, especially when you consider that Pandora is such a well-known and well-established non-interactive music streaming service,” White said. “There are no checks and balances on the MLC. We believe that’s something, as part of the MLC redesignation, that the Copyright Office really needs to consider.”
White was alluding to the Copyright Office’s ongoing “redesignation process” of the MLC — a five-year check-up required by Music Modernization Act to ensure that the organization is functioning effectively. The first-ever redesignation started in January and is set to wrap up later this year.
Global Music Rights (GMR), the boutique U.S. performance rights organization (PRO) that represents Bruce Springsteen, Bruno Mars, Prince, Drake, Pharrell Williams, the John Lennon estate, the Eagles and others, has settled its copyright infringement lawsuit against the Vermont Broadcast Association (VBA) that was filed in January. According to Global Music Rights, which was founded by […]
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Russell Simmons was recently served in Bali and learned that he was the target of a defamation lawsuit from Drew Dixon, who has accused the mogul of sexual assault. Russell Simmons is asking that the lawsuit from Drew Dixon be dismissed because he never mentioned the music executive’s name in recent comments about the claims he’s facing.
Radar Online reports that Russell Simmons, 66, is angling to have Dixon’s defamation lawsuit tossed out after being served on March 5 while at the Gdas Bali Health And Wellness Resort.
From Radar Online:
Simmons has since argued that none of the “statements alleged in the Complaint are defamatory as a matter of law, because all the statements are opinion — not fact — and Plaintiff is not clearly identifiable in any of the statements” in a new court filing.
In her lawsuit, Dixon zeroed in on statements made by Simmons during a Dec. podcast interview in which he allegedly attempted to discredit rape accusations against him from six women.
Simmons was a guest on In Depth With Graham Besinger where he explained that he was never “forceful” in his relationships and that anything physical between another woman was consensual.
“If you had more foursomes than most guys at once, could someone leave and feel hurt? Could some reimagine a story out of thousands of people? Could someone want notoriety in the market where people thirst for fame, even infamous,” Simmons said.
Dixon’s legal team wrote that Simmons has, “gone on a concerted and malicious campaign to discredit Ms. Dixon and to so damage her reputation.”
Simmons maintains that he was speaking generally and not about anyone specific.
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Universal Music Group (UMG) is facing a lawsuit that claims a 1992 Mary J. Blige hit featured an unlicensed sample from a 1973 funk song that’s famous for being sampled in dozens of other tracks, including releases from Biggie and Tupac as well as a recent Doja Cat tune.
In a complaint filed Thursday (April 4) in Manhattan federal court, Tuff City Records accused Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) of copyright infringement over Blige’s “Real Love,” which spent 31 weeks on the Hot 100 in 1992 and reached a peak of No. 7 on the chart.
The allegedly-copied song? “Impeach the President” by the Honey Drippers — a legendary piece of hip-hop source material with a drum track that’s also been sampled or interpolated by Run-DMC, Dr. Dre and many others. Most recently, it was featured in Doja Cat’s 2023 track “Can’t Wait.”
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In the complaint, Tuff City’s attorneys say they have “advised defendant repeatedly of the presence of the uncleared sample” in “Real Love” but that Universal has done nothing about it.
“Defendant has repeatedly refused to engage plaintiff in substantive negotiations to rectify the foregoing, let alone agreed to compensate Plaintiff for the past infringement or on an ongoing basis,” wrote Tuff City’s attorney Hillel Parness in the complaint.
Blige herself is not named in the lawsuit nor accused of any wrongdoing.
In a bizarre wrinkle, Tuff City claims that UMG Recordings — a subsidiary of UMG and the owner of the master to “Real Love” — has already reached an agreement regarding the use of the uncleared sample on the sound recording. But they say the music giant’s publishing arm has refused to do the same as it relates to the underlying composition.
“Defendant’s refusal to cooperate with plaintiff is difficult to reconcile with the fact that plaintiff reached an agreement with UMG Recordings,” Tuff City’s attorneys write.
Tuff City, which owns a large catalog of old songs, is no stranger to copyright litigation. Over the past fifteen years, the company has sued over tracks by Jay-Z, Beastie Boys, Christina Aguilera, Frank Ocean and others, typically alleging that they featured unlicensed samples or interpolations.
That process has not always gone smoothly. In 2014, a judge dismissed a case over Jay-Z’s “Run This Town” on the grounds that any alleged sample was “barely perceptible” after multiple listens. In 2018, another judge ordered Tuff City to repay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees spent by Beastie Boys defending a case that was “clearly without merit.”
The new case is also not the first time Tuff City has sued over “Impeach the President.” Way back in 1991, the company sued Sony Music and Def Jam over claims that producer Marley Marl had illegally sampled the track on LL Cool J tracks “Around the Way Girl” and “Six Minutes of Pleasure.”
At the time, the lawsuit was a novel legal attack on sampling, which had long been at the core of hip-hop but had rarely involved paying for licenses or seeking authorization. In a 1992 article, the New York Times warned that Tuff City’s lawsuit over “Impeach the President” could fundamentally change hip hop, forcing rappers and producers to clear every element used in their albums — a formidable idea at the time.
“A single rap album can include dozens of samples, from single drumbeats to full musical phrases,” the New York Times article reads. “Finding the copyright owners, negotiating fees or royalties and gaining legal clearance is time consuming and can add tens of thousands of dollars to the production costs.”
Tuff City’s case eventually settled on confidential terms, but it proved to be a sign of things to come. In the years since, federal courts have ruled that nearly any amount of sampling of sound recordings counts as copyright infringement. As a result, labels and artists today attempt to clear almost any direct sampling in their songs and will typically remove those elements if a deal can’t be reached.
Of course, Blige’s “Real Love” came out just months after Tuff City filed its case against LL Cool J, and well before such practices had become universal. It’s unclear why the company waited more than 30 years to sue over it, but copyright law has a so-called “rolling” statute of limitations that allows for such long-delayed actions.
A spokesman for UMG did not immediately return a request for comment.
An attorney who filed one of the several sexual abuse lawsuits against Sean “Diddy” Combs is now facing potential discipline himself after a federal judge in another case sharply criticized him for filing suits designed to “garner media attention” and “embarrass defendants.”
In an order issued Wednesday (April 3) in a separate lawsuit, Judge Denise Cote referred Tyrone Blackburn to the grievance committee for New York’s federal court district – an entity that decides whether attorneys have violated court rules. She cited his conduct in five different lawsuits, saying Blackburn’s filings in those cases had featured “glaring deficiencies.”
“A reasonable inference from Blackburn’s pattern of behavior is that he improperly files cases in federal court to garner media attention, embarrass defendants with salacious allegations, and pressure defendants to settle quickly,” Judge Cote wrote. “Indeed, his submissions to this court have been rife with disturbing allegations against the defendants and defense counsel.”
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The order, which came in a legal malpractice lawsuit Blackburn filed last year, referred him to the grievance committee for the Southern District of New York for “such action as it deems appropriate.”
Judge Cote’s ruling is notable because Blackburn is currently serving as lead counsel to Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones, a producer who filed a sweeping abuse lawsuit against Combs in February. The lawsuit is one of several such cases filed against Combs, in addition to a federal criminal investigation that led to raids of his homes last month. Combs has strongly denied all allegations of wrongdoing.
In an email to Billboard on Thursday, Blackburn said: “Not sure how this is at all relevant to Rodney Jones’ case, or any other case I have. This will not have any impact on my ability to proceed in Mr. Jones’ case. Although Judge Cote’s decision was a referral to the SDNY’s grievance committee, and not a sanction, I plan on appealing the decision.”
In his lawsuit last month, Jones accused Combs of repeated sexual assault and harassment while Jones was working as a producer on the rapper’s 2023 The Love Album. But he also went further, claiming that Diddy and others had violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the federal RICO statute best known for criminal cases against the Mafia. As part of those claims, he named several other prominent people as members of that alleged illegal conspiracy, including Universal Music Group CEO Lucian Grainge and former Motown CEO Ethiopia Habtemariam.
Blackburn has already faced scrutiny over those accusations filed on Jones’ behalf. In her response to the lawsuit, Combs’ attorney, Shawn Holley, took the unusual step of calling out her opposing counsel by name, saying that Blackburn had “ignored” evidence of Combs’ innocence before filing the case.
“Our attempts to share this proof with Mr. Jones’ attorney, Tyrone Blackburn, have been ignored, as Mr. Blackburn refuses to return our calls,” Holley said at the time. “We will address these outlandish allegations in court and take all appropriate action against those who make them.”
Last week, attorneys for UMG took similar aim at Blackburn. Arguing that Grainge had “utterly nothing to do” with the allegations against Diddy, the label’s lawyers said the claims were so “offensively false” that they would seek to punish Blackburn himself for filing them.
“A license to practice law is a privilege,” wrote Donald Zakarin, a longtime music industry litigator who represents UMG and Grainge. “Mr. Blackburn, plaintiff’s lawyer, has misused that license to self-promote, gratuitously, falsely and recklessly accusing the UMG defendants of criminal behavior.”
UMG’s filing last week said the company would seek legal sanctions against Blackburn under federal Rule 11, which requires lawyers to make a “reasonable inquiry” into allegations they file in court. That’s the same rule that Judge Cote cited Wednesday in her ruling against Blackburn, saying “his actions in this and prior cases indicate a repeated failure to meet his Rule 11 obligations.”
In arriving at that conclusion, the judge cited multiple instances in which Blackburn allegedly filed cases in the wrong court without properly investigating whether it was the right jurisdiction, as well as an incident in which he called a defense attorney “a disgusting racist” amid a dispute over picking a mediator. The judge also cited an allegation from an opposing lawyer that Blackburn had specifically filed a case in federal court, rather than state court, “because doing so would make the press more likely to pick up on it.”
“Significant resources have been spent by judges of the court and defendants named in actions he has filed to address glaring deficiencies in his filings,” Judge Cote wrote in her ruling on Wednesday. “A referral to this court’s Grievance Committee is warranted.”
It’s unclear how long such a case will take before the grievance committee renders a decision, or what kind of disciplinary measures the body might hand down.
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Ye FKA Kanye West has yet another lawsuit on his hands. A former Donda Academy employee is suing him over his antisemitic behavior and more.
As reported by TMZ, the Chicago, Illinois, native will have to clear his already muddied name in a court of law. A former Donda Academy official is claiming that the “Father Stretch My Hands” performer was doing the absolute most at his children’s school back in 2022. Trevor Phillips says he was hired late that year to help source raw materials for the YZY apparel brand. His responsibilities were soon expanded to oversee the unaccredited private institution during the same time Ye went full antisemite.
On Tuesday, April 2, Phillips filed a lawsuit alleging that not only would Ye be openly bigoted in front of students but also once told them he was going to be build a jail in the school where kids who misbehaved would be locked in cages. “By filing this lawsuit, we hope our injured clients’ rights are vindicated, and that the famous artist Mr. West understands that his messages — which we alleged preach discrimination, antisemitism and Hitler-love — have no place in the world,” Phillips’ attorney, Carney R. Shegerian, explained in a formal statement to People.
This is not the first time Ye has been sued by employees of Donda Academy. According to The Los Angeles Times, in April 2023, two former staffers filed a lawsuit claiming they were unjustly terminated from their positions without warning. Additionally, they revealed the school had very unusual policies including that the kids could not wear clothing from Nike and adidas, outside food was not allowed and there were no janitorial services.
Representatives from Ye’s camp have yet to respond to the matter.
Kanye West is facing another lawsuit filed by a former employee at his Donda Academy, this time accusing him of discriminating against Black staffers and seeking to lock students in cages.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday (April 2) in Los Angeles court, Trevor Phillips says the embattled rapper (who now goes by Ye) treated the Black staff at the school “considerably worse than white employees” — and then subjected him to “incessant harassment” and “humiliation” when he spoke up about it.
Like the several other lawsuits filed by former Donda Academy employees, the new complaint includes a number of bizarre allegations about West and his conduct at the school. It claims he told students to “shave their heads” and that he “intended to put a jail at the school” where students could be “locked in cages.”
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In another odd alleged episode, Phillips claims West summoned him to a room at the Nobu Hotel, where the rapper put on The Batman and watched it in silence.
“After a long and awkward silence, Kanye finally spoke again,” Phillips claims in the suit. “Turning his attention back to Phillips, he began an unprovoked and bigoted rant attacking Jewish people.” Later that same evening, Phillips claims West lay on the bed and simulated masturbating while talking about having orgies.
Phillips claims he was finally fired last year.
The case is the latest lawsuit filed by former staffers of Donda Academy and the Yeezy Christian Academy that preceded it. One of them, filed in July, claimed that the school lacked windows because the embattled rapper “did not like glass” and that students were not allowed on the second floor because West was “reportedly afraid of stairs.” Another case, filed in April 2023, alleged that the only food available to students was sushi.
As with those earlier cases, the strange allegations contained in Tuesday’s lawsuit supported more straightforward legal claims, including discrimination, harassment, retaliation and wrongful termination.
A spokesperson for West did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday.