Diddy's lawyers say woman suing him and Harve Pierre for rape has 'a public-facing identity'
The new filing in the federal lawsuit comes one day after Diddy settled his racial discrimination case against a liquor giant being defended by E. Jean Carroll's lawyer.
An attorney for hip-hop and business mogul Diddy says the woman suing him for sexual assault “has a public-facing identity” that could become obvious if a new legal brief isn’t sealed from public view.
New York City litigator Jonathan D. Davis asked U.S. District Judge Jessica G.L. Clarke on Wednesday to allow him to seal his brief opposing the woman’s request to proceed anonymously, saying he’s doing so “out of an abundance of caution.”
“The Opposition Brief does not reveal Plaintiff’s name, but it does refer to certain facts about Plaintiff that the Combs Defendants have learned because her identity was disclosed by Plaintiff’s counsel,” according to the letter, which refers to Diddy’s legal name, Sean Combs.
Diddy’s co-defendant, Harve Pierre, president of Diddy’s Bad Boy Entertainment, joined in the request through his lawyer, Scott Leemon of New York City.
The woman’s lawyers agree the filing should be sealed. They asked in December that she be identified in public court proceedings and filings only as Jane Doe instead of her true name, saying identification “poses a risk of mental harm.”
“Here, Combs and Pierre are public figures and counsel anticipates that the media attention to this case will be substantial, especially because the commencement of this action happened to come on the heels of a highly-public lawsuit also filed by Wigdor LLP against Mr. Combs on behalf of his former girlfriend, Casandra ‘Cassie’ Ventura,” according to the Dec. 12 filing from Wigdor and firm partners Michael J. Willemin and Meredith A. Firetog.
Diddy and Cassie, a prominent R&B singer, settled the lawsuit confidentially two days after it was filed, and Wigdor’s firm filed the current lawsuit under the Jane Doe plaintiff pseudonym three weeks later.
The 14-page complaint, which has “trigger warning” written on the first page, alleges Diddy, Pierre and an unknown “third assailant” raped the woman in 2003 when she was 17. It also alleges Pierre, a longtime music executive, introduced her to Diddy after they met at a lounge in Michigan, and that the men “plied Plaintiff—a teenager—with alcohol and drugs while commenting on and touching her body” at Diddy’s recording studio in New York City. Diddy denied the allegations in a social media post that said, “LET ME BE ABSOLUTELY CLEAR: I DID NOT DO ANY OF THE AWFUL THINGS BEING ALLEGED. I WILL FIGHT FOR MY NAME, MY FAMILY AND FOR THE TRUTH.”
The new sealing request isn’t controversial, but the woman’s original request to proceed anonymously will be the first legal argument in the case for Judge Clarke, a 2023 President Joe Biden appointee who investigated police brutality while a civil rights prosecutor in New York.
Clarke is an Akron, Ohio, native who was chief of the New York Attorney Civil Rights Bureau from 2019 to 2023 and a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Housing & Civil Enforcement Section from 2010 to 2016. She oversaw the state’s investigation into the New York City Police Department’s response to the protests over George Floyd’s murder in 2020, and she told the Senate Judiciary Committee in January 2022 that she found her work on housing discrimination cases particularly meaningful.
“It’s such a great honor to work on Fair Housing Act cases where you’re protecting people’s rights to live where they want to live and be free from discrimination,” Clarke told the committee.
Clarke also worked at the law firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel, LLP from 2016 to 2019, in which time her clients included Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate, according to a questionnaire she completed for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University, where she was honored for her service to the Black community, and her law degree from The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.
Wigdor and his co-counsel say it’s “well-settled that it is within the sound discretion of the court to allow a plaintiff to proceed anonymously in judicial proceedings.
The issue for judges such as Clarke is whether a plaintiff has a “substantial privacy interest” that “outweighs the customary and constitutionally-embedded presumption of openness in judicial proceedings,” according to Wigdor’s nine-page request, which quotes a 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decision from 2008.
The woman suing Diddy has an interest in anonymity that “outweighs any other factors that would justify disclosing her name,” the filing says.
The first factor is that her claims “concern brutal sexual assault and rape when she was a teenager and, accordingly, are highly sensitive and of a personal nature,” the request says, citing four cases between 1997 and 2023.
The second factor is the risk of mental harm.
“Plaintiff’s experiences, which as described in the Complaint are deeply traumatic, and having those experiences played out in a public forum could spark more trauma for Plaintiff,” according to the request.
Davis and his co-counsel, Anthony LoMonaco, along with Pierre’s lawyer first said they would file their opposition to the anonymity motion by Dec. 27. They secured a deadline extension to Jan. 17 after telling Judge Clarke it was needed “due to circumstances beyond the control of the Combs Defendants, which circumstances are of a confidential nature.”
Diddy’s and Pierre’s response to the complaint due by Feb. 20. Diddy’s companies Daddy’s House Recordings, Inc. and Bad Boy Entertainment Holdings, Inc., also are defendants, as is the unknown “third assailant.” The lawsuit has one cause of action: The violation of New York City’s gender-motivated violence protection law.
In addition to the federal lawsuit, Diddy is being sued in New York state court by a woman who says he raped her when she was a student at Syracuse University in 1991, and in another lawsuit by a woman who says he raped her in 1990, then choked her two days later.
This week, he dismissed a racial discrimination lawsuit he filed against the Diageo liquor company in New York state court after reaching an undisclosed settlement. The complaint alleged the maker of Diddy’s DeLeón tequila and Ciroc vodka slighted his brands in favor of brands such as Don Julio and Casamigos because Diddy is Black.
“Sean Combs and Diageo have now agreed to resolve all disputes between them. Mr. Combs has withdrawn all of his allegations about Diageo and will voluntarily dismiss his lawsuits against Diageo with prejudice,” according to a joint statement on Tuesday. “Diageo and Mr. Combs have no ongoing business relationship, either with respect to Cîroc vodka or DeLeón tequila, which Diageo now solely owns.”
The lawyers indicated on Dec. 8 that a settlement may be in the works: They asked the judge to vacate a Dec. 21 hearing on Diddy’s preliminary injunction and rescheduled it to Feb. 19.
In the weeks prior, Diageo’s lawyers had cited Cassie’s lawsuit and the accompanying “tsunami of negative media attention” in a letter to the judge that said “these public and disturbing accusations against Mr. Combs are already harming DeLeón by virtue of its association with Mr. Combs.”
“For example, Diageo received an email from an influencer who partners with Diageo requesting to end her partnership with DeLeón, saying ‘morally [she] can not support’ DeLeón, since it ‘is associated with’ Mr. Combs, in light of the ‘very triggering’ accusations made by Ms. Ventura,” according to the Nov. 17 letter from Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP. “Requiring DeLeón to feature Mr. Combs as the face of the DeLeón brand under these circumstances, as CWS asks this Court to enjoin Diageo to do, would only compound that harm, potentially causing devastating and permanent damage to the brand.”
Diageo’s lawyers include Roberta A. Kaplan, who represents columnist E. Jean Carroll in her sexual assault and defamation lawsuits against former President Donald Trump. Kaplan’s co-counsel is Ellen V. Holloman of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP.
Kaplan and Holloman alerted the judge to the two state court lawsuits in a Dec. 1 letter that said Combs is “well-aware that these lawsuits make it impossible for him to continue to be the ‘face’ of anything” which is “perhaps” why his lawyers chose not to file a reply in support of their motion for preliminary injunction.
Diddy was on the other side of anonymity in his Diageo lawsuit. Instead of opposing it, his lawyers sought court permission to file under seal “materials contain confidential business information and proprietary information.”
Suing under his company Combs Wines and Spirts LLC, Diddy was represented in the Diageo case by John C. Hueston, Moez M. Kaba and Mariah N. Rivera of Newport Beach-based Hueston Hennigan LLP.
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Good evening, do you plan on posting the amended lawsuit with adding Cuba Gooding jr and Yung Miami? I was hoping to read it.