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After Garth Brooks was accused of rape and other sexual misconduct in a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles on Thursday (Oct. 3), the country star has responded and insists he is “not the man they have painted me to be.” The allegations come from an unnamed woman who claims Brooks sexually assaulted her while she […]
Country music star Garth Brooks is facing a lawsuit over allegations that he sexually assaulted an unnamed woman while she worked for him as a hairstylist and makeup artist.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday (Oct. 3) in Los Angeles court, attorneys for the anonymous Jane Roe accuser claim Brooks raped her during a May 2019 stay in a Los Angeles hotel room and also exposed her to “other appalling sexual conduct” during that same year.
The lawsuit claims that the singer took advantage of the accuser’s mounting financial troubles to subject her to “a side of Brooks that he conceals from the public.”
“This side of Brooks believes he is entitled to sexual gratification when he wants it, and using a female employee to get it is fair game,” Roe’s attorneys write.
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Notably, the accuser also alleges that Brooks was behind a mysterious lawsuit filed last month, obtained by Billboard, in which an anonymous “celebrity” plaintiff sued in Mississippi federal court over an an unnamed accuser’s sexual abuse allegations. Calling the accusations false and an “ongoing attempted extortion,” the earlier case asked a judge to stop her from further publicizing them.
“The abusive Mississippi action by Brooks is a blatant attempt to further control and bully his sexual assault victims by utilizing his multimillionaire resources to game the legal system,” Roe’s lawyers write in Thursday’s complaint. “Brooks is desperate to prevent his millions of fans from learning about the horrific things he has said and done to a junior female employee who did nothing to deserve such treatment.”
A representative for Brooks did not immediately return a request for comment.
In her lawsuit, the plaintiff claims she began working in 1999 for Brooks’ wife, Trisha Yearwood, but started to work for Brooks in 2017. When she experienced financial difficulties in 2019, she says Brooks offered to help her by giving her more work.
The first alleged incident occurred earlier in 2019, when Brooks allegedly emerged from the shower naked and forced the accuser to touch his erect penis and said he had fantasized about her performing oral sex on him. She says she denied his advances but continued to work for him.
Months later, in May, Roe claims that when she and Brooks stayed together in a Los Angeles hotel, he booked only a single room for both of them. She claims that during their stay, he violently raped her in the room.
During the months that followed, the plaintiff claims Brooks repeatedly acted inappropriately toward her in other ways, including sending sexually explicit text messages, physically groping her breasts, and making sexually charged remarks toward her.
“We applaud our client’s courage in moving forward with her complaint against Garth Brooks,” said the accuser’s attorneys, from the prominent plaintiff’s firm Wigdor LLP. “The complaint filed today demonstrates that sexual predators exist not only in corporate America, Hollywood and in the rap and rock and roll industries but also in the world of country music.”
Though Brooks has not yet responded to Thursday’s lawsuit, documents filed in the earlier mystery case in Mississippi tell what appears to be his side of the story.
After a former professional associate “encountered financial difficulties” and asked for financial assistance in 2020, the lawsuit says that the unnamed celebrity plaintiff “complied out of loyalty” and offered help. But when he eventually refused her increasing demands, inclduing for salaried employment and medical benefits, the lawsuit says the woman responded with “false and outrageous allegations of sexual misconduct.”
Later, the unnamed woman allegedly “offered to refrain from publicly filing her false and defamatory lawsuit against plaintiff in exchange for a multi-million dollar payment” — a demand that the lawsuit called “extortion.”
“Defendant’s allegations are not true,” the unnamed celebrity wrote in last month’s lawsuit. “Defendant is well aware, however, of the substantial, irreparable damage such false allegations would do to Plaintiff’s well-earned reputation as a decent and caring person, along with the unavoidable damage to his family and the irreparable damage to his career and livelihood that would result if she made good on herthreat to ‘publicly file’ her fabricated lawsuit.”
A producer who worked on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is suing the creators of the hit Broadway play Stereophonic, claiming they stole material from his memoir about working on the legendary album.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday (Oct. 2) in Manhattan federal court, Ken Caillat and co-author Steven Stiefel call the Tony Award-winning show an “unauthorized adaptation” of their 2012 book Making Rumours — and accuse playwright David Adjmi of “flagrant and willful infringement.”
“Stereophonic copies the heart and soul of Making Rumours,” attorneys for Caillat and Stiefel write in their complaint. “The striking similarity is readily apparent right from the beginning of the show.”
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Featuring the music of Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, Stereophonic debuted on Broadway last fall, eventually winning five Tony Awards including best play, best direction of a play and best featured actor in a play.
Critics quickly noted the similarities to the infamous story of the recording session for Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, which featured high tensions and heavy drug usage. A reviewer for the Wall Street Journal said the play was “fictionalizing Fleetwood Mac”; another critic said the play “isn’t literally about Fleetwood Mac, but c’mon.”
In their lawsuit, Caillat and Stiefel say the hit play “presents a nearly identical story arc as Making Rumours,” told from the same perspective of a sound engineer in a recording studio, about five characters who are “undeniably analogous to the members of Fleetwood Mac.”
“Stereophonic is undoubtedly a play based on plaintiffs’ memoir Making Rumours because substantial similarities exist between the two works, a reality that has been independently confirmed by those familiar with plaintiffs’ book who have also had the opportunity to review the play,” the duo’s lawyers write.
The new case presents tricky legal questions. Under U.S. law, historical events cannot be monopolized under copyrights, and nobody can claim exclusive ownership over the real story behind the making of Rumours. But specific creative elements of how such a story is told can be protected by copyrights, and film, TV and stage producers often license non-fiction books as the basis for their works.
In their case, Caillat and Stiefel claim that Adjmi copied those exact kinds of creative choices when he created his play: “Stereophonic’s audience not only sits in the same place that Mr. Caillat sat, but the show also depicts Mr. Caillat’s wild ride as it is described in Making Rumours.”
Adjmi is no stranger to copyright litigation. Back in 2014, he filed a preemptive lawsuit over his off-Broadway show called 3C, which riffed on the sitcom Three’s Company. In that case, filed after the sitcom’s owners threatened litigation, Adjmi argued the play was clearly a legal parody of the earlier show. And he eventually won, securing a ruling that his play was a legal “fair use” of the famous show.
In their complaint, Caillat and Stiefel noted that earlier case, but pointedly argued that such a defense would not work this time around: “Stereophonic is not a parody, and it is not in any way a fair use of Making Rumours.”
Reps for Adjmi did not immediately return requests for comment.
A federal judge is refusing to wade into whether Jay-Z can use copyright termination to retake control of the rights to his debut album Reasonable Doubt — meaning that the complex issue won’t be resolved before a court-ordered auction of Damon Dash’s one-third stake in the company that owns the album.
The judge had been asked to decide that tricky question because of allegations that Jay-Z was using “false” threats of a looming termination to drive down the auction price for Dash’s stake in Roc-A-Fella Records Inc., which controls the rights to the famous album.
But in a ruling Monday (Sept. 30), Judge Robert W. Lehrburger flatly refused to do so — saying he had no legal power to add complicated questions of copyright law to the already-messy fight over Dash’s stake.
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“The asset that is the subject of the auction is Dash’s one-third interest in RAF [Roc-A-Fella] itself, not the work owned by RAF,” the judge wrote. “The Court does not presently have jurisdiction over the validity of Carter’s copyright termination notice.”
As early as next month, the U.S. Marshals Service will sell off Dash’s 33.3% interest in Roc-A-Fella Inc., an entity whose only real asset is the sound recording copyright to Reasonable Doubt. The rest of the storied label, which Dash co-founded with Jay-Z in 1994, is not involved.
Though the court-ordered auction was originally intended to pay off an $823,000 judgment in a civil lawsuit, it has since expanded to include other Dash creditors. New York City’s child services agency wants some of the proceeds to go toward more than $193,000 that Dash owes in unpaid child support; New York state says they must pay down roughly $8.7 million that Dash owes in back taxes and penalties.
The owners of the other two-thirds of Roc-A-Fella — label co-founders Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) and Kareem “Biggs” Burke — have already attempted to stop the auction, including making changes to the company’s bylaws and intervening in the lawsuit. But a federal judge rejected such opposition in February, and the sale could take place as early as this month.
As the auction has approached, one major unresolved question for any potential buyer is just how long Roc-A-Fella will continue to own its only real valuable asset.
The so-called termination right, a provision created by Congress in the 1970s, empowers authors to reclaim ownership of copyrighted works decades after they sold them away. If Jay-Z is eligible for it, termination would allow him to take back the rights to his sound recording of Reasonable Doubt roughly 35 years after he released the album, meaning 2031. That would set a clear time limit on the amount of revenue a Roc-A-Fella buyer would derive from their investment.
But last month, attorneys for New York City filed court papers arguing that Jay-Z was not, in fact, eligible for termination — and that he and others were using “false” threats of an approaching termination to drive down the price of Dash’s stake in his company.
“Jay-Z’s statements to the press have poisoned the environment for the auction,” wrote Gerald Singleton, an attorney for the city, asking the judge to halt the auction and issue a ruling on whether or not Jay-Z could use termination to win back control of Reasonable Doubt.
Days later, Jay-Z lawyer Alex Spiro responded that there was “no merit to NYC’s accusations,” and that the Dash case was not the proper place to decide Jay-Z’s rights to the album: “Put simply, this is not the appropriate time, forum, or case to litigate any issues relating to Jay-Z’s notice of termination.”
In Monday’s ruling, Judge Lehrburger agreed with Spiro and Jay-Z: “[NYC]’s motion to stay the auction for purposes of having this court determine the validity of the copyright termination notice filed by Shawn Carter a/k/a Jay-Z in connection with the work Reasonable Doubt, an asset owned by RAF, is denied.”
The judge also rejected New York City’s attempt to conduct discovery into Roc-A-Fella’s holdings, saying that kind of investigation was also beyond the scope of the current litigation. An attorney for the city declined to comment on the order.
The auction is currently scheduled for Oct. 21, but it has been postponed multiple times and could be delayed again. A minimum purchase price has been set at $3 million.
Facing a federal court order to turn over all his copies of a rare Wu-Tang Clan album, Martin Shkreli is warning a judge that he can’t remember all the people with whom he shared the album – and that it’s “highly likely” that other people still have copies.
In August, Judge Pamela K. Chen ordered Shkreli to hand over any copies of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, an ultra-rare Wu-Tang album that he once owned but was forced to forfeit to federal prosecutors to help pay restitution after he was convicted of securities fraud.
In a sworn statement on Monday, Shkreli promised the judge that he had turned over all copies that he could find in his possession. But he also said he didn’t know exactly who he had shared it with, and that some of them probably still have copies.
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“Because I shared the musical work several times several years ago, I cannot recall each and every time that I have shared the musical work,” he told the judge. “It is possible, and indeed I find it highly likely, that one of the many people who viewed, heard, or otherwise accessed the musical work via my social media recorded the musical work and retains a copy of the same.”
Wu-Tang’s fabled album was recorded in secret and published just once, on a CD secured in an engraved nickel and silver box. In addition to the bizarre trappings, Once Upon came with strict legal stipulations — namely, that the one-of-a-kind album could not be released to the general public until 2103.
In 2015, Shkreli — soon to become infamous as the man who intentionally spiked the price of crucial AIDS medications — bought Once Upon at auction for $2 million. But after he was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, he forfeited it to federal prosecutors to help pay his multi-million dollar restitution sentence. PleasrDAO, a collective of early NFT collectors and digital artists, then bought the album from the government in 2021 for $4 million, and in 2024 acquired the copyrights and other rights for another $750,000.
Amid recent efforts to monetize Once Upon, Pleasr sued Shkreli in June after he made threats to release the album publicly and destroy the exclusivity that the company had purchased. The lawsuit accused him of both breaching the federal forfeiture order and violating federal trade secrets law, which protects valuable proprietary information from misappropriation.
In August, Judge Chen granted Pleasr a preliminary injunction requiring Shkreli to hand over any copies of Once Upon that were still in his possession. His attorneys had argued Shkreli had the right to create private copies when he owned the album and could retain them even after he forfeited the original copy, but the judge rejected that argument.
Responding to the injunction order on Monday, Shkreli told the judge he had “searched my devices, electronic accounts, and other personal effects” and handed over any copies he owned. He swore that he had done so “under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America.”
But Judge Chen’s injunction also included another requirement: That he divulge the “names and contact information of the individuals to whom he distributed the data and files.” On that front, Shkreli offered less info on Monday.
“Between 2015 and 2021, I recall occasionally sharing the musical work, primarily by sending digital files of the musical work to others via email, [and] also saved copies of the musical work on USB or other drives and gave those drives to others,” Shkreli said, before saying that he “cannot recall” each of those occasions.
He also told the judge that he had “shared the musical work on my social media pages or livestreams” on at least three occasions, including once in 2023 and again in 2024. It was during these public postings, Shkreli said, that someone likely created copies of the album.
Both sides did not immediately return requests for comment on Monday’s filing.
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.
This week: A civil war within the Fugees as Pras sues Lauryn Hill for fraud; the latest on Diddy’s legal drama, including an appeal and two new lawsuits; New York mayor Eric Adams hires Jay-Z’s lawyer to defend him against federal criminal charges; and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Fugee Feud
The Fugees — a hip hop trio made up of Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel — rose to fame in the mid-1990s with hits like “Killing Me Softly,” “Ready or Not” and “Fu-Gee-La,” launching solo careers for all three. But 25 years later, it appears something is rotten in the state of Fugee.
In a scathing lawsuit Tuesday (Oct. 1) that took personal shots at Hill, Pras accused his bandmate of fraud and breach of contract. He claimed that she had exploited his need for cash amid mounting legal problems to get him to sign onto a plan for a 2023 tour in which she enriched herself at his expense.
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“It did not matter to Hill if she took full advantage of Michel’s vulnerability — her friend and creative partner of over 30 years,” his lawyers wrote. “In fact, she counted on exploiting that vulnerability to carry out her scheme.”
Michel also pinned the blame on Hill for the group’s recently canceled 2024 tour, which had been set to kick off in early August but was quietly called off just days before it was set to start. He cited her “gross mismanagement” as a key factor behind poor ticket sales.
Hill quickly responded with a detailed rebuttal, calling it “a baseless lawsuit” that was full of “false claims and unwarranted attacks.” She said Pras had omitted key details — like that she had expanded the tours specifically to help him pay his legal bills and had secured him advances that had not yet been paid back.
For more details on the lawsuit and Hill’s response, go read our entire story here.
Other top stories this week…
DIDDY, DIDDY & MORE DIDDY – It was a busy week for the indicted hip hop mogul, who stands accused of federal charges of sex trafficking and racketeering. Most notably, his lawyers formally launched an appeal of a judge’s ruling denying him bail, marking their latest effort to get him released ahead of his trial. He was also hit with two new civil lawsuits, one from a woman who claims he raped her in 2001 at his New York City studio, and another from a Florida model who alleges he repeatedly drugged and sexually assaulted her over a four-year period. Oh, and 120 more victims might be suing him soon, if you believe press statements by a Houston plaintiff’s lawyer.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR DIDDY CASE? – If you want a quick primer on the immediate next steps in the case — how soon might the trial be? where is he being jailed? — go read my explainer on the situation.
HIZZONER HIRES JAY-Z’S LAWYER – Facing a federal indictment of his own, New York City Mayor Eric Adams hired Alex Spiro of the law firm Quinn Emanuel, a prominent litigator with extensive music industry experience and a client list including Jay-Z, Megan Thee Stallion and 21 Savage. For a detailed breakdown of Spiro’s music litigation history, go read our full story here.
BRITNEY PERFUME BATTLE – A cosmetics company called Give Back Beauty hit back hard at a recent lawsuit filed by Revlon, which accused the smaller company of working with four ex-Revlon execs to “sabotage” the company’s decades-old fragrance partnership with Britney Spears. In the response, Give Back argued that Revlon only filed the “baseless” lawsuit because it was upset that Britney made the choice to “reject” the industry titan and sign with a competitor.
SUCKER PUNCH SETTLEMENT – DaBaby settled a civil lawsuit over a 2020 incident in which he allegedly sucker punched a property manager named Gary Pagar during a music video shoot at the man’s Los Angeles mansion. The settlement, reached two months after he took a plea deal to avoid jail time over the same episode, will avoid the need for a trial that had been set to kick off in November.
YSL JUDGE HAS HAD IT – Nearly two years after the trial kicked off, the judge overseeing Young Thug’s sprawling Atlanta gang trial reached her boiling point with the prosecutors trying the case. At a hearing in which she appeared visibly frustrated, Judge Paige Reese Whitaker complained of “poor lawyering, “baffling” decisions and steps to repeatedly “hide the ball.”
AI LAW VETOED – California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a landmark bill aimed at establishing first-in-the-nation safety measures for large artificial intelligence models, a major blow to efforts attempting to rein in the homegrown industry that is rapidly evolving with little oversight. The bill would have established some of the first regulations on large-scale AI models, but Newsom and other critics said it would have had “a chilling effect on the industry.”
The judge overseeing Young Thug’s sprawling Atlanta gang trial appears to have reached her wits’ end with the prosecutors trying the case — complaining of “poor lawyering, “baffling” decisions and steps to repeatedly “hide the ball.”
At a hearing on Monday (Sept. 30), Judge Paige Reese Whitaker sharply questioned Chief Deputy DA Adriane Love over her handling of the trial, which has already been going for nearly two years and is expected to run well into next year.
“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 to Love, appearing visibly frustrated.
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“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, unless it is just that you are so unorganized that you are throwing this case together as you try it,” she added, saying that the “haphazard” approach was making the trial more difficult for everyone involved.
The reprimand for Love, over an issue with evidence that she tried to introduce without a witness, prompted Young Thug’s defense attorneys to move to a mistrial. Though the judge ultimately denied that request, she warned prosecutors that she was nearing her breaking point.
“I truly am struggling with whether all of this is purposeful, or this is just really poor lawyering on the part of members of the state’s team. Either way, it’s really unfortunate. If it’s something other than poor lawyering, it’s more than unfortunate,” the judge wrote. “I don’t know if I can stress any more than I already have how much the state’s lawyers need to make an effort to be upfront and forthright in the trial of this case.”
Thug (Jeffery Williams) and dozens of others were indicted in May 2022 over allegations that their YSL was not really a record label called Young Stoner Life but rather a violent Atlanta gang called Young Slime Life. Citing Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law, prosecutors claim the group operated a criminal enterprise that committed murders, carjackings, armed robberies, drug dealing and other crimes over the course of a decade.
The trial kicked off in January 2023 but has faced repeated delays and disruptions, including an unprecedented 10-month jury selection, the stabbing of another defendant and a bizarre episode in which the presiding judge was removed from the case over a secret meeting with prosecutors. Whitaker took over the case in July.
While the slow-moving trial has dragged on, Thug has been sitting in jail for more than two years, repeatedly denied bond by both judges to handle the case over fears that he might intimidate witnesses. Prosecutors have only presented part of their vast list of potential witnesses, and the trial is expected to run well into 2025.
Lauryn Hill is facing a lawsuit from her Fugees bandmate Pras Michel, claiming she defrauded him over the group’s shortened 2023 tour — and that her “gross mismanagement” also led to the abrupt recent cancellation of the 2024 tour.
In a complaint filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court, lawyers for Pras allege that Hill exploited his mounting legal bills to get him to sign onto a plan for the 2023 tour with false promises – a deal they say enriched Hill at the expense of her bandmate.
“Hill’s ploy to appear to be Michel’s supposed savior was actually a devious attempt to make a big score for herself by generating millions of dollars from a Fugees tour,” his lawyers write. In the process, it did not matter to Hill if she took full advantage of Michel’s vulnerability – her friend and creative partner of over 30 years. In fact, she counted on exploiting that vulnerability to carry out her scheme.”
The lawsuit also sheds light on the aborted 2024 tour – which had been set to kick off in early August but was quietly cancelled just days before it was set to begin, with no immediate reason given. In his court papers, Michel pins the blame squarely on Hill.
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“Because of the gross mismanagement by Hill and [her company], who had taken far too long to close the deal with Live Nation, the 2024 U.S. tour tickets sales were dismal,” his attorneys say. “There was little or no marketing for the tour, and not enough time between the announcement and the first concert date to do sufficient advance sales to justify the tour.”
Comprised of Hill, Michel, and Wyclef Jean, the Fugees rose to fame in the 1990s with hits like “Killing Me Softly,” “Ready or Not,” and “Fu-Gee-La.” After splitting up in 1998, the three each had successful solo careers and mostly stayed separate until recent years, when they have attempted multiple reunion tours.
In 2019, Michel was hit with sweeping federal criminal charges, including funneling money from a Malaysian financier to Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and then later trying to influence an extradition case on behalf of China. In April 2023, he was convicted on 10 counts including conspiracy, witness tampering and failing to register as a foreign agent.
In his lawsuit on Tuesday, Michel’s lawyers said Hill took advantage of a “desperate man” who needed to pay expensive criminal lawyers, using an advance of cash to get him to sign a deal with “onerous terms” that he would have “easily rejected in the years before his criminal conviction.”
“While the contractual advance paid to Pras enabled him to retain his new criminal lawyers, the 2023 tour agreement was a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” his lawyers say.
The touring agreement was “based on a lie” about how much Hill was being paid, Michel’s lawyers say, and it “ceded all financial and creative control” to her and her company – which gave her the “total lack of transparency she needed in order to secretly siphon off money.”
The lawsuit claims that Hill secretly took 40 percent “off the top” from the tour revenue before accounting for the one-third split that was owed to each of the three members. And he says the tour made much less money than it should have, thanks to a “bloated” budget and an abrupt cancellation of the second half of the tour.
As for the 2024 tour, Michel claims that Hill misled Live Nation that Michel was “on board” with the plan for another run of concerts when no such deal had been inked – and did so in order to receive a $1.1 million advance.
“That was another lie by Hill and [her company] since Michel was not ‘on board,’” say Miche’s lawyers, adding that her company “never signed the fully-negotiated agreement, never paid Michel anything, and never intended to do either.”
In technical terms, the lawsuit accuses Hill of fraud, fraudulently inducing Michel to sign the 2023 deal and breaching both her contract and her fiduciary duty. It also demands a ruling that the 2023 deal is voided and a court-ordered accounting of the books from the tour.
A spokesman for Hill did not immediately return a request for comment.
Attorneys for Sean “Diddy” Combs have formally launched an appeal of a judge’s ruling denying him bail, marking their latest effort to get him released from jail as he awaits trial on racketeering and sex trafficking charges.
In a notice filed in Manhattan federal court on Monday (Sept. 30), the rapper’s lawyers said they would ask the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit to overturn Judge Andrew L. Carter’s ruling earlier this month, which kept Combs behind bars on the grounds that he might pose a danger if released.
Monday’s filing did not contain detailed arguments, which will be filed later at the appeals court.
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Combs, also known as Puff Daddy and P. Diddy, was once one of the most powerful men in the music industry. But earlier this month he was indicted by federal prosecutors over accusations of sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson and bribery. If convicted on all the charges, he potentially faces a sentence of life in prison.
Prosecutors allege that Combs ran a sprawling criminal operation, aimed at satisfying his need for “sexual gratification.” The charges detailed “freak offs” in which Combs and others would allegedly ply victims with drugs and then coerce them into having sex with male sex workers, as well as alleged acts of violence and intimidation to keep victims silent.
“For decades, Sean Combs … abused, threatened and coerced women and others around him to fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation and conceal his conduct,” prosecutors wrote in the indictment. “To do so, Combs relied on the employees, resources and the influence of his multi-faceted business empire that he led and controlled.”
A day after the indictment was unsealed, Carter denied the rapper bail. Though Combs’ legal team had offered to pay a $50 million bond and submit to strict monitoring, the judge was swayed by arguments from prosecutors that he might still flee or might obstruct the government’s case by pressuring witnesses.
The ruling has left Combs at the Metropolitan Detention Center — a federal correctional facility in Brooklyn that has long been criticized for danger and dysfunction. In court filings, Agnifilo has called the MDC “horrific” and “not fit for pre-trial detention.” In a press conference after the bail hearing, he called the jail “inhumane housing conditions.”
DaBaby has settled a civil lawsuit over a 2020 incident in which he allegedly attacked a property manager during a music video shoot at a Los Angeles mansion, two months after he took a plea deal to avoid jail time over the episode.
The rapper (Jonathan Lyndale Kirk) was set to face a November trial in the case, in which Gary Pagar claims that DaBaby and others “beat, punched, spat on, threatened, shoved, and robbed” him after he confronted them for breaking rental rules at his Hollywood Hills mansion.
But in a court filing last week (Sept. 25) in Los Angeles Superior Court, attorneys for both Pagar and DaBaby said they had “reached a global settlement of this entire action.” Terms of the deal were not disclosed in public filings, and neither side immediately returned requests for comment.
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In addition to Pagar’s civil lawsuit, DaBaby was also initially charged with felony battery over the incident. But in July, he pleaded guilty to a lesser misdemeanor battery charge and agreed to pay $10,000 restitution in a deal with prosecutors that allowed him to avoid prison time.
Pagar sued in February 2021, accusing DaBaby and others of fraud, breach of contract, battery and other wrongdoing. He claimed that the rapper and his associates had rented the house for “a private vacation with no more than nine people,” and swore to him that there would be “no crowds, no parties, and no filming.”
“In fact, the purpose of defendants’ trip to Los Angeles was to gather 40 people and a commercial film crew at Mr. Pagar’s house to film a music video,” his lawyers wrote at the time. “When Mr. Pagar asked them to stop, they beat and battered him, stole his phone by force so he couldn’t call the police, and threatened him. Then they vandalized his house and left, after stealing various valuable items.”
When DaBaby was criminally charged by Los Angeles prosecutors over the same alleged incident in April 2022, he released purported footage that appeared to show Pagar using a racial epithet during the encounter. He accused Pagar of lying to law enforcement and the media “not knowing that he’s caught on camera.”
Across more than three years of litigation, Pagar’s civil case moved slowly. Last summer, attorneys for DaBaby asked to delay the proceedings so that the rapper would not be forced to testify in ways that would “potentially incriminate him in the parallel criminal case.” Then earlier this year, DaBaby again moved to delay the case, citing scheduling conflicts for his lawyers.
Before the settlement, a trial had been scheduled to start November 11.
As reported by Rolling Stone, DaBaby pleaded guilty to a single count of misdemeanor battery at a July 11 court hearing, agreeing to pay restitution and serve one year of probation. At the hearing, prosecutors told the judge they had agreed to drop the felony charge because they foresaw to “problems of proof of proving serious bodily injury at trial.”