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British prosecutors say they have been given a file of evidence from police about alleged sexual offenses by comedian Russell Brand and are considering whether to charge him. The Crown Prosecution Service said late Saturday (Nov. 2) that “we have been passed a file by the police to consider a charging decision in this case. […]
Young Thug‘s father isn’t too happy about the conditions of his son’s release from jail.
Jeffrey Williams Sr. spoke with local Atlanta news outlet 11Alive outside of the courthouse last night and admitted, while being grateful that his son is finally out, he was “startled” by his son’s decision to enter a non-negotiated guilty plea because he wanted Thug to keep fighting.
“Well, I was kinda startled behind it,” he told reporters before saying he agreed with his son’s lawyers to keep trying to fight instead of entering a guilty plea. “Let’s keep fighting, you know, let’s make them continue to embarrass themselves, but at the same token, I never tried to interfere with his decisions and I support him.”
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He added, “I feel great that he’s going home, but at the same token, I still want him to fight, but that’s his decision. I raised him to be the man that he is. You know, I’ve always been in his life, from a pup to now. And I’m gonna continue to be in his life. As an adult, he has to make his own decisions.”
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Thugger Sr. was then asked about some of the conditions of his son’s release, one of which included not being allowed to visit the Metro Atlanta area for 10 years. “I’m totally against that, because this is where he’s from. To have a district attorney take that away from him — she’s from another state — To see her take a man away from where he’s from, to have to go live somewhere else, that’s offensive to me. I’m really offended by that.”
He was wearing a hat featuring the name of DA Fani Willis’ opponent, Courtney Kramer, in November’s upcoming election. “In order for us to get back to our normal life, we gonna have to put in some more work. But the work that we need to do foremost for the city of Atlanta, Fulton County? We need to get rid of the poison that’s in our system, and that’s the district attorney’s office, so vote Courtney Kramer.”
Williams Sr. has been vocal about supporting his son and Gunna while they both were embroiled in this ordeal. He came to Gunna’s defense multiple times when the YSL member was accused of being a snitch by some peers and fans after he took an Alford plea
You can watch the full interview below:
When Young Thug went free Thursday (Oct. 31) after more than two years in custody, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the crescendo of a series of events that started months ago, transforming an endless, oft-delayed trial into a moment of catharsis for the superstar artist.
In June, the trial against Young Thug’s alleged “YSL” gang had been churning along for more than a year, stretching across 10 months of jury selection and five months of testimony. As the prosecutors worked through a vast list of witnesses, there was no clear end in sight — the trial was expected to run well into 2025, but even that was just a guess.
By this week, the state was handing out plea deals to multiple defendants, including offering one to Thug that would have sent him home immediately. He refused to take it, and his attorneys felt bold enough to simply plead guilty and hope the judge would set him free — a gamble that paid off.
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After a whirlwind week, it’s worth asking the question: How on earth did we get here?
The story starts on June 10, when Thug’s attorney Brian Steel made a stunning revelation in open court. He said he had learned of a secret “ex parte” meeting between Judge Ural Glanville, prosecutors and a key witness named Kenneth Copeland, and claimed that it warranted a mistrial.
Up to that point, Glanville’s handling of the case had resulted in an exceptionally slow pace. Though a sprawling racketeering case against many defendants was always going take time, the Glanville approach — featuring an unprecedented 10-month jury-selection process, repeated “comfort breaks,” and other delays in testimony — had put the case on pace to be the longest in state history.
At the June hearing, Steel alleged far more than bad pacing by Judge Glanville. He claimed that during the secret meeting, Glanville had helped prosecutors coerce the uncooperative Copeland into testifying with threats of extended jail time, all without notifying defense counsel.
The revelation set into motion case-changing events. Rather than addressing Steel’s concerns, Glanville repeatedly demanded to know who had told him about the meeting. When Steel refused to do so, the judge held him in criminal contempt and sentenced him to jail time — a ruling that was later overturned on appeal.
In the weeks that followed, Glanville repeatedly maintained that the ex parte meeting had been proper. But amid a barrage of demands that he either declare a mistrial or step aside, he finally referred the issue to another a judge to decide whether he could continue presiding over the trial.
On July 15, Judge Rachel Krause said that he could not. Though she ruled that the meeting did not appear to have been illegal, the judge ruled that Glanville would be removed from the case in order to preserve “the public’s confidence in the judicial system.”
That ruling punted the case to Judge Paige Reese Whitaker, a Fulton County jurist with a reputation for efficiency. She quickly showed why: On her first day on the bench, Whitaker said she wanted to pick up the pace, demanding that prosecutors be more organized in how they were presenting witnesses and testimony. “It should not take another seven months,” Whitaker said at that hearing.
By late September, Whitaker appeared to have reached her wits’ end with the prosecutors trying the case. Visibly frustrated at a Sept. 30 hearing, the judge blasted Chief Deputy DA Adriane Love and other government attorneys for “poor lawyering,” saying that their “haphazard” approach was making the trial more difficult for everyone involved.
“It is baffling to me that somebody with the number of years of experience that you have, time after time after time, continues to seemingly and purposefully hide the ball to the extent you possibly can, for as long as you possibly can,” Whitaker said. “I really don’t want to believe that it is purposeful but honestly, after a certain number of times, you start to wonder how can it be anything but that.”
Weeks later, that same “haphazard” approach led to an incident that set the stage for Thug’s eventual release
During witness testimony on Oct. 23, prosecutors were questioning a witness named Wunnie Lee (aka Slimelife Shawty), a former defendant in the YSL case who signed a plea agreement in exchange for testifying.
While on the stand, prosecutors asked Lee to identify certain defendants by showing him social media posts. While reading one of the posts, Lee read aloud the hashtag #freequa — a reference to a previous prison sentence for Marquavius Huey (aka Qua), one of Thug’s current co-defendants.
That was a crucial error by prosecutors. The jury was not supposed to know which defendants had previously been incarcerated, and defense attorneys argued that the government was supposed to redact the post and prep Lee not to mention it. After the admission before jurors, defense attorneys quickly moved for a mistrial. “We’re not going to be able to unring this bell,” one said.
The misstep quickly drew another sharp critique from Whitaker, who at one point told prosecutors that she was trying to find a way to “fix your sloppiness so that everybody won’t have wasted 10 to 12 months of their lives in this trial.” Though she refused to grant a mistrial that would permanently end the case, Whitaker warned that she might order that the massive trial be started over from scratch.
Faced with that disastrous prospect, prosecutors and defense attorneys quickly began talking about plea deals. Nobody wanted a mistrial: The DA’s office had already sunk years of taxpayer dollars into the costly case, and defendants had already sat in jail for years waiting for a verdict.
Days later, three of Young Thug’s co-defendants — Quamarvious Nichols, Marquavius “Qua” Huey and Rodalius “Lil Rod” Ryan — all reached deals with prosecutors. Two others — Deamonte “Yak Gotti” Kendrick and Shannon Stillwell — who are facing some of the most serious accusations in the case, refused to do so.
Like the other defense attorneys, Thug’s attorneys (Steel and co-counsel Keith Adams) hunkered down with prosecutors over the week to negotiate a potential deal. But at a press conference Thursday, Adams said the DA’s office did not approach the talks in “good faith” and appeared to only be trying to “save face.” Though they offered to let Thug escape the case with only 15 years probation and no prison time, Adams said they also insisted on onerous conditions in which Thug would affirm the state’s accusations against him.
With a judge that had shown herself to be highly skeptical of the prosecutors trying the case, Steel said Thursday that Thug and his legal team made the “excruciating” decision to plead guilty without a negotiated sentence — and to place their faith in Judge Whitaker for a lenient sentence.
“Negotiations totally broke down with the district attorney’s office, horribly broke down,” Steel told reporters. “At that point we believed that justice could be found with the honorable court. Jeffery just wanted to go home.”
The move was extremely risky. Prosecutors promptly told the judge that, in the absence of a negotiated plea deal, they were seeking a draconian sentence against Thug: a whopping 45 years, 25 of which would be served in prison and 20 more on probation.
After that, both Steel and Thug addressed the court, offering impassioned pleas for a light sentence. But before Whitaker handed down her sentence — just 15 years probation, allowing Thug to go home that day — she seemed most swayed by the conduct of the prosecutors themselves.
“It is not lost on the court that the state … was willing to entirely dismiss [several counts] and was willing to give a sentence that permitted Mr. Williams to walk out of the door today,” the judge said. “[The state] does not seem to be particularly worried that Mr. Williams, if on the streets, would be a danger to society.”
Following the sentence, Thug hugged his lawyers. By late Thursday evening, he had been released.
Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” did not infringe the copyright to Marvin Gaye‘s “Let’s Get It On,” a federal appeals court ruled Friday (Nov. 1), saying the two songs share only “fundamental musical building blocks” that cannot be owned by any single songwriter.
In a ruling issued more than a decade after Sheeran’s chart-topping hit was first released, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected an infringement lawsuit filed by Structured Asset Sales, a company that owns a small stake in the rights to Gaye’s song.
The case argued that Sheeran’s song copied a chord progression and rhythm from Gaye’s, but the appeals court said the lawsuit was essentially seeking “a monopoly over a combination of two fundamental musical building blocks.”
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“The four-chord progression at issue—ubiquitous in pop music—even coupled with a syncopated harmonic rhythm, is too well-explored to meet the originality threshold that copyright law demands,” a panel of appeals court judges wrote. “Overprotecting such basic elements would threaten to stifle creativity and undermine the purpose of copyright law.”
Looking at the two songs more broadly, the Second Circuit also ruled that Sheeran’s track was clearly not similar enough to Gaye’s to amount to copyright infringement: “Neither the melody nor the lyrics of ‘Thinking Out’ Loud bears any resemblance to those in ‘Let’s Get It On.’ Undeniable and obvious differences exist between them.”
Sheeran has faced multiple lawsuits over “Thinking,” a 2014 track co-written with Amy Wadge that reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and ultimately spent 46 weeks on the chart. He was first sued by the daughter of Ed Townsend, who co-wrote the famed 1973 tune with Gaye. That case ended in a high-profile trial last year, resulting in a jury verdict that cleared Sheeran of any wrongdoing.
The case decided on Friday is a separate lawsuit filed by SAS, an entity owned by industry executive David Pullman that controls a different one-third stake in Townsend’s copyrights — meaning a one-ninth stake in the rights to Gaye’s iconic track. In May, weeks after the big jury verdict, a federal judge tossed out the SAS lawsuit, ruling that it was seeking an “impermissible monopoly over a basic musical building block.”
In upholding that decision on Friday, the Second Circuit echoed the earlier ruling’s concern about overprotecting copyrights and threatening future songwriting.
The chord progression and harmonic rhythm at issue in the case are “garden variety” elements that had been used in numerous songs, the appeals court said, pointing to evidence that they had appeared in “Georgy Girl” by The Seekers and “Since I Lost My Baby” by The Temptations — two tracks that predated Gaye’s song by years. The appeals court noted that there is a “limited number of notes and chords available” and that “common themes frequently reappear.”
“In the field of popular songs, many, if not most, compositions bear some similarity to prior songs,” the court wrote, quoting from a treatise on copyright law. “So while a similar chord progression and harmonic rhythm may create a similar sound and feel, that is not enough.”
The ruling is a major victory for Sheeran, but the battle over “Thinking” isn’t quite over yet. SAS also has another lawsuit against Sheeran pending, advancing an unorthodox effort to cite a more expansive copyright covering the sound recording to “Let’s Get It On” rather than the written music. That case has been paused while the earlier lawsuit played out.
In a statement to Billboard following Friday’s decision, SAS owner Pullman criticized the appeals court for citing “two songs out of over 60 million registered songs” in its analysis. And he stressed that the decision had not addressed his company’s arguments relying on a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision about federal regulatory power.
Sheeran’s attorney, Donald Zakarin of the law firm Pryor Cashman, told Billboard that he and his clients were “gratified” by the court’s ruling: “This ruling is consistent with the jury’s rejection of any claim of infringement in the [earlier] case, finding that Ed and Amy independently created ‘Thinking Out Loud.’”
Legendary hip-hop producer Madlib has filed a lawsuit against his former manager Eothen “Egon” Alapatt, alleging the executive abused his role to claim undue profits from Madlib’s music and merch companies, among other accusations.
In a complaint filed Thursday (Oct. 31) in Los Angeles court, attorneys for Madlib say Alapatt began managing Madlib’s business affairs around 2010 when the famed producer left his deal with Stones Throw Records — where Alapatt worked as an executive — in an effort to “own and control his music.” Around that time, the complaint alleges that Alapatt was fired from Stones Throw.
According to the lawsuit, Madlib trusted Alapatt to set up and manage two business entities (“Madicine Show” for his music interests and “Rapp Cats” for his merchandise) in Madlib’s name, with profits from the businesses to be shared between the two parties. However, Madlib allegedly discovered only recently that Alapatt was not only failing to properly run those businesses but was “also engaged in rank self-dealing, concealing information from and repeatedly breaching his duties to Madlib, and otherwise engaging in persistent and pervasive mismanagement.”
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The complaint further alleges Alapatt abused his position by taking “a fee off the top” of all income generated by Madlib’s label, Madicine Show, and that he “refused to account to Madlib” about his compensation and failed to provide any written agreements to the producer. Madlib’s lawyers additionally claim that Alapatt refused to allow an audit of his own business, Now-Again — which they say Alapatt inserted under false pretenses as a go-between for Madicine Show and its distributor, Ingrooves — to ascertain what proceeds it earned from Madicine Show.
Elsewhere, the complaint alleges that Alapatt “directed a single lawyer and single accountant to represent him” as well as Madlib, Madicine Show, Rapp Cats and Now-Again without Madlib’s “informed consent” and then “directed that lawyer and that accountant to refuse to cooperate with Madlib” and the new professional team Madlib had assembled after his relationship with Alapatt went south.
The complaint states that Madlib only discovered the extent of Alapatt’s alleged malfeasance in April 2023, when he finally managed, through “forensic accounting,” to learn more about the financials of Madicine Show and Rapp Cats during the period of 2018 to mid-2022. His lawyers claim this revealed “several accounting irregularities” and “a lack of any backup documentation” for several hundred thousand dollars in “‘consulting,’ ‘commissions,’ ‘fees’ or ‘reimbursements’” for Alapatt as well as a second named defendant, Jeffrey Carlson, a.k.a. Jeff Jank — an alleged associate of Alapatt’s who formerly worked as an art director at Stones Throw and is described in the complaint as “a member of Rapp Cats.”
The complaint further claims that Alapatt took “tens of thousands of dollars for personal expenses” from the two business entities, and that there was no documentation of employee payroll, inventory or artist royalty statements.
Alapatt also allegedly “captur[ed] half of Madlib’s producer royalties and advances for himself” while locking Madlib out of his Ingrooves, Apple Music, Bandcamp, YouTube and Facebook accounts; the complaint also claims he locked Madlib out of the Instagram account for his trademarked alter-ego Quasimoto, a cartoon character that the producer used throughout his career for merchandise and music.
“Madlib has since demanded that Madicine Show and Rapp Cats be wound up and dissolved and that any contractual relationship with those entities…be terminated,” the complaint reads. “[Alapatt] refuses to do so.” Instead, it claims, Alapatt told Madlib that he’s welcome to “‘buy him out’ of his interest in those entities or the underlying intellectual property.”
Thursday’s lawsuit is the second lawsuit to be filed against Alapatt over the past year. Last October, the manager was also sued by the estate of Madlib’s late collaborator MF DOOM for allegedly stealing the rapper’s notebooks full of lyrics. In response to that suit, attorneys for Alapatt called the case “baseless and libelous,” and characterized it as “the continuation of a year-long smear campaign.”
Madlib’s team is seeking a jury trial and a judicially supervised wind-up and dissolution for Madicine Show and Rapp Cats, “to include a full and complete accounting of the assets and liabilities of the entities [and] a determination of any unauthorized remuneration,” among other requests. Madlib is also seeking damages from Alapatt and Now-Again.
Alapatt and his attorney did not immediately respond to Billboard‘s requests for comment. Carlson also did not immediately return a request for comment.
Young Thug is officially returning home after pleading guilty in a criminal case accusing him of leading a violent Atlanta street gang. The rapper was sentenced to 15 years probation and no prison time on Thursday (Oct. 31). Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Thug (real name […]
Young Thug was sentenced to 15 years probation and no prison time after pleading guilty in the long-running criminal case accusing him of leading a violent Atlanta street gang, a stunning end to a legal saga that rocked the music industry.
After days of closed-door negotiations with Fulton County prosecutors, Thug (Jeffery Williams) refused Thursday (Oct. 31) to take a plea deal that would have sent him home immediately. Instead, he opted for a non-negotiated guilty plea, leaving his fate in the hands of Judge Paige Reese Whitaker.
The move paid off: Later on Thursday, Whitaker sentenced Thug to only 15 years probation with no time to be served in prison, meaning that he would be set free on Thursday after more than two years in custody. In doing so, she urged the Grammy-winning rapper to use his platform to set a good example for young people in the future.
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“I know you’re talented, and if you choose to continue to rap, you need to try to use your influence to let kids know that is not the way to go and that there are ways out of poverty besides hooking up with the powerful guy at the end of the street selling drugs,” Whitaker said.
Thug’s guilty plea marks a key turning point in a criminal case that has captivated the music industry for more than two years. Pitting prosecutors in America’s rap capital against one of hip-hop’s biggest stars, the YSL case has raised big questions — about the fairness of the criminal justice system; about violent personas in modern hip-hop; and about prosecutors using rap lyrics as evidence.
Standing before the judge at a tense hearing Thursday, Thug pleaded guilty to several counts, including possession of drugs and firearms, and pleaded no contest to several others, including the core racketeering accusations that alleged he was the leader of a criminal gang.
Without the negotiated plea deal, prosecutors recommended a far harsher sentence than they had offered: a whopping 45 years, with 25 served in prison and 20 years on probation. Thug’s attorney, Brian Steel, then offered an extended rebuttal to the state’s claims and urged leniency. Finally, Thug himself spoke, saying he took “full responsibility for my crimes” and pleading with the judge to see that he has “a good heart.”
“I just hope that you find it in your heart to allow me to go home and be with my family and just do better as a person,” the artist told the judge.
After she handed down her sentence, the judge offered a quick warning to Thug before adjourning for the day: “Good luck to you. And there better be no violations, but if there are any, you’re coming back to see me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Thug said back.
Thursday’s guilty plea came days after the trial was thrown into chaos by botched testimony from a state’s witness, sparking talk of a mistrial. Since then, prosecutors and defendants have struck a slew of deals rather than risk starting over from scratch in the trial, which has already stretched across 10 months of jury selection and 11 months of testimony to become the longest-ever in state history.
Thug, a chart-topping rapper and producer who helped shape the sound of hip-hop in the 2010s, was arrested in May 2022 along with dozens of others. In a sweeping indictment, prosecutors alleged that his “YSL” — nominally a record label standing for “Young Stoner Life” — was also a violent gang called “Young Slime Life” that had wrought “havoc” on the Atlanta area for nearly a decade.
The case, built around Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law, claimed that YSL had committed murders, carjackings, drug dealing and many other crimes. And prosecutors alleged that Thug was “King Slime,” operating as a criminal boss amid his rise to fame. “It does not matter what your notoriety is, what your fame is,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said at the time. “We are going to prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.”
Thug strongly denied the accusations and has long maintained his innocence. On the opening day of the trial, his attorney Steel argued that despite a difficult local upbringing, Thug “doesn’t even know most of the people in this indictment” and had no reason to run a criminal organization.
From the start, the YSL case has been beset by delays. Starting in January 2023, it took an unprecedented 10-month process just to pick a jury. After the trial itself got underway in November 2023, prosecutors meandered through a vast list of witnesses that included a stunning 737 names. There was also a jailhouse stabbing of one defendant, as well as a bizarre episode over a secret meeting with a witness that resulted in the presiding judge being removed from the case.
While the slow-moving trial dragged on, Thug sat in jail for more than two years, repeatedly denied release on bond over fears that he might intimidate witnesses.
Though Thug is now going home, the YSL case is not over.
Attorneys for co-defendants Deamonte “Yak Gotti” Kendrick and Shannon Stillwell said their clients had refused plea deals on Thursday, meaning they will continue to face trial and move toward an eventual verdict. Kendrick and Stillwell stand accused of carrying out the 2015 murder of rival gang leader Donovan Thomas, a crime that figures prominently in the prosecution’s case.
A federal appeals court says Live Nation and Ticketmaster must face a class action claiming they charged “extraordinarily high” prices to thousands of ticket buyers, ruling that the concert giants cannot enforce “opaque and unfair” user agreements to scuttle the lawsuit.
Live Nation claimed fans had waived their right to sue in court when they bought their tickets, arguing they had signed agreements promising to litigate any legal disputes via private arbitration — a common requirement when purchasing event tickets and other services from many companies.
But in a ruling Monday (Oct. 28), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Live Nation’s agreements were “unconscionable and unenforceable” since they would make it “impossible” for fans to fairly pursue claims against the company.
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“Forced to accept terms that can be changed without notice, a plaintiff then must arbitrate under … opaque and unfair rules,” the appeals court wrote. “The rules and the terms are so overly harsh or one-sided as to unequivocally represent a systematic effort to impose arbitration as an inferior forum.”
The ruling described Live Nation’s agreements in scathing terms, calling them “so dense, convoluted and internally contradictory to be borderline unintelligible” and “poorly drafted and riddled with typos.” The terms were so confusing, the court said, that Live Nation’s own attorneys “struggled to explain the rules” during a court hearing.
A spokesperson for Live Nation did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday (Oct. 31).
The ruling came as Live Nation is facing a sweeping antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice, seeking to break up the company over allegations that it illegally maintained a monopoly in the live entertainment industry. That separate action, which could take years to resolve, remains pending.
The class action against Live Nation, filed in 2022, accuses the company of violating antitrust laws by monopolizing the market for concert tickets and engaging in “predatory” behavior. Filed on behalf of “hundreds of thousands if not millions” of ticket buyers, the case claims Live Nation and Ticketmaster abused their dominance to charge “extraordinarily high” prices to consumers.
The lawsuit was something of a sequel to an earlier class action, in which the same legal team (from the law firm Quinn Emanuel) made highly-similar claims against Live Nation. That earlier case was dismissed after a federal judge ruled that such accusations must be handled via private litigation because of agreements that the plaintiffs had signed when they purchased their tickets.
In Monday’s ruling, the Ninth Circuit said that earlier victory had been both a gift and a curse for Live Nation. Though it had allowed the company to avoid a class-action lawsuit, the ruling raised the troubling prospect of facing thousands of individual arbitration cases all at once.
“Defendants foresaw that if their motion to compel [arbitration] in that case were granted, they would be faced with a large number of parallel individual claims by ticket purchasers,” the appeals court wrote. “In anticipation of such claims, defendants sought to gain in arbitration some of the advantages of class-wide litigation while suffering few of its disadvantages.”
According to the ruling, doing so involved amending its terms of use to require fans to submit to “novel and unusual” procedures for “mass arbitration” offered by a new arbitration company called New Era ADR.
It was this new arbitration agreement that the appeals court declared unenforceable in Monday’s ruling. The court roundly criticized the rules, saying they had placed unfair terms on any consumers who wanted to litigate a dispute with Live Nation. And, citing the company’s market share, the court said fans had almost no choice but to sign the agreement.
“Because Ticketmaster is the exclusive ticket seller for almost all live concerts in large venues, prospective ticket buyers in most instances are faced with a choice,” the court wrote. “They can either use Ticketmaster’s website and accept its terms, or refuse to use the website and be entirely foreclosed from purchasing tickets on the primary market.”
The infamous 2016 surveillance video showing Sean “Diddy” Combs assaulting his former girlfriend wasn’t illegally leaked to the media by prosecutors, government attorneys argue in a new filing that accuses the rapper’s lawyers of trying to “suppress a damning piece of evidence.”
In a motion filed late Wednesday, federal prosecutors responded to leaking accusations made by Combs’ lawyers earlier this month. They say it was impossible that they had leaked the video of Combs striking Cassie Venture to CNN because they didn’t even have it at the time it was published in May.
The government says Diddy’s attorneys know that, but that they’re using the leak accusations as a way to prevent jurors from seeing Combs “brutally physically assaulting a victim” — a crucial piece of evidence.
“Without any factual basis, the leak motion seeks to suppress highly probative evidence … by claiming that it was grand jury material leaked by government agents,” prosecutors write. “But, as the defendant is fully aware, the video was not in the Government’s possession at the time of CNN’s publication and the Government has never, at any point, obtained the video through grand jury process.”
Combs, also known as Puff Daddy and P. Diddy, was once one of the most powerful men in the music industry. But last month, he was indicted by federal prosecutors on charges of racketeering and sex trafficking over what the government says was a sprawling criminal operation aimed at satisfying his need for “sexual gratification.” If convicted on all the charges, he faces potential life prison sentence.
Wednesday’s new filing came three weeks after Combs’ attorneys demanded an investigation into the alleged leaks, claiming they had “led to damaging, highly prejudicial pre-trial publicity that can only taint the jury pool and deprive Mr. Combs of his right to a fair trial.”
Diddy’s attorneys pointed specifically to the Cassie video, which showed Combs striking his then-girlfriend in the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel in 2016 and made headlines when CNN released it in May.
“The videotape was leaked to CNN for one reason alone: to mortally wound the reputation and the prospect of Sean Combs successfully defending himself against these allegations,” Agnifilo wrote. “Rather than using the videotape as trial evidence, alongside other evidence that gives it context and meaning, the agents misused it in the most prejudicial and damaging way possible.”
Wednesday’s filing from prosecutors also addressed Diddy’s recent demand that the government reveal the names of his alleged sexual abuse victims. In a motion earlier this month, his lawyers arguing he cannot fairly defend himself without knowing their identities.
In the response, the government argued that such disclosures “poses serious risks” to the safety of the victims, citing Diddy’s “significant history of violence and obstruction” that resulted in him being denied release on bail last month.
“Due to the defendant’s history, the Government has serious concerns about victim safety and the possibly of witness tampering if a list of victim names were provided to the defendant,” prosecutors wrote.
A woman who has accused Sean “Diddy” Combs of rape cannot proceed with her lawsuit under a “Jane Doe” pseudonym, a Manhattan federal judge says – a ruling that could potentially impact the many other cases filed against him by anonymous accusers.
In a decision Wednesday, Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil ruled that the privacy rights of Combs’ alleged victim did not trump the right of all defendants “to defend themselves” in open court against such “heinous” allegations.
“Plaintiff’s interest in avoiding public scrutiny, or even embarrassment, does not outweigh the interests of both Combs and the public in the customary and constitutionally-embedded presumption of openness in judicial proceedings,” the judge wrote.
“Plaintiff has chosen to bring this lawsuit, leveling serious charges against Combs and, as such, she has put her credibility in issue,” the judge added. “Combs is, therefore, entitled to investigate her background and challenge her allegations and her credibility.”
The ruling came in one of at least 15 lawsuits brought against Combs in recent weeks by Texas attorney Tony Buzbee, all of which have been filed under “Doe” pseudonyms. Though Vyskocil’s ruling is not binding on other judges, it could influence how they handle the issue in Buzbee’s other cases, as well as numerous other lawsuits that have been filed anonymously against Combs.
Buzbee did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday morning.
Combs has faced a flood of abuse accusations over the past year, starting with civil lawsuits and followed by a bombshell federal indictment last month in which prosecutors allege he ran a sprawling criminal operation for years aimed at satisfying his need for “sexual gratification.” If convicted on the charges, which include sex trafficking and racketeering, he faces a potential sentence of life in prison.
In the current case – filed last week by one of the 120 alleged victims that Buzbee claims to represent – the accuser alleges that Comb raped her and threatened her life in 2004 when she was 19 years old.
The case was filed under the Jane Doe pseudonym without prior approval from the judge — a common tactic in such lawsuits but one that Vyskocil ruled Wednesday was technically a violation of federal litigation rules.
In her decision, the judge said anonymous lawsuits are supposed to be the exception rather than the rule – both because American court cases are supposed to be open to the public, and because accused defendants have a right to know who is accusing them of wrongdoing.
Buzbee had argued that abuse accusers can face backlash after filing such cases, and that other accusers might be scared away from speaking out if forced to reveal their identities. Though Vyskocil acknowledged the “toll” that such public scrutiny can take, she repeatedly pointed to the “fundamental unfairness” of allowing only one side to remain anonymous.
“Plaintiff, who is an adult, has now decided to file a lawsuit in which she accuses a famous person of engaging in heinous conduct approximately twenty years ago and, further, accuses a number of businesses of complicity in that alleged conduct,” the judge wrote. “Defendants have a right to defend themselves, including by investigating Plaintiff, and the people have a right to know who is using their courts.”