Sean “Diddy” Combs performs on the BET Awards 2022 on the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, California, U.S., June 26, 2022. REUTERS/David Swanson/ File Picture Acquire Licensing Rights
Dec 6 (Reuters) – Hip-hop star Sean “Diddy” Combs was accused in federal court docket on Wednesday of collaborating within the gang rape of a 17-year-old woman in his Manhattan recording studio in 2003, marking the fourth lawsuit leveling sexual assault allegations towards him in latest weeks.
Combs, 54, founding father of the landmark label Dangerous Boy Information and a vastly profitable rap performer, issued a press release on Wednesday categorically professing his innocence and declaring his accusers had been “on the lookout for a fast payday.”
The plaintiff within the newest lawsuit was recognized as Jane Doe, described as a highschool pupil on the time she met associates of Combs in a Detroit-area lounge 20 years in the past.
The criticism says they flew her on a non-public jet from Michigan to the New York space, then drove her to the New York Metropolis studio the place Combs and two different males plied her with medicine and alcohol.
In response to the lawsuit, the plaintiff was then raped in a toilet of the studio by Combs and the 2 different males, one after the opposite, as she slipped out and in of consciousness. It stated Combs additionally watched one of many different assaults after he was completed.
She was later flown again to Michigan however had little recollection of her return journey to the Detroit suburbs, the lawsuit says.
As proof to assist her allegations, the lawsuit contains a number of images allegedly depicting the accuser – her face deliberately blurred – posing inside Combs’ studio, together with one wherein she seems to be sitting on Combs lap, each of them dealing with the digital camera.
The criticism, filed in U.S. District Courtroom in Manhattan, stated the plaintiff has since suffered “excessive emotional misery that has impacted practically each facet of her life and private relationships.”
The lawsuit was filed below New York Metropolis’s Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Safety Legislation, which was prolonged to permit accusers to sue over alleged offenses from way back, even when statutes of limitations have expired.
Combs’ newest accuser stated she selected to come back ahead after studying information accounts of the lawsuit introduced towards Combs final month by his ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura, who performs below the stage identify Cassie, accusing him of subjecting her to bodily abuse, intercourse trafficking and rape over the course of a decade.
Ventura and Combs, who has previously passed by such monikers as P. Diddy,” Puff Daddy and Diddy, introduced the following day they’d settled the case below confidential phrases.
Combs’ lawyer, Ben Brafman, stated then that the settlement was “under no circumstances an admission of wrongdoing,” and that his shopper maintained his “flat-out denial” of Ventura’s claims.
However Combs was hit with two extra lawsuits in a matter of days – one by a plaintiff named Joi Dickerson-Neal, who accused the rap mogul of drugging and sexually assaulting her whereas she was a pupil at Syracuse College in 1991. One other “Jane Doe” criticism accused him of forcing her and a pal into nonconsensual intercourse within the early Nineteen Nineties.
He has denied these allegations.
“For the final couple of weeks, I’ve sat silently and watched folks attempt to assassinate my character,” he wrote in his social media submit on Wednesday. “Let me be completely clear: I didn’t do any of the terrible issues being alleged.”
One of many two different males alleged to have raped the plaintiff in Wednesday’s lawsuit was named within the criticism as Harve Pierre, a former high govt at Dangerous Boy. The third man was recognized within the criticism solely because the “Third Assailant.”
Pierre himself was accused in a separate lawsuit final month of utilizing his place of authority at Dangerous Boy to groom and sexually assault a former assistant.
Neither Pierre nor any representatives could possibly be reached for remark. A spokesperson for Dangerous Boy instructed Individuals journal final month the report label was “investigating the allegations.”
Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles
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