Here's the amended complaint against Nicki Minaj's husband, Kenneth Petty, for sex assault
Petty is required to register as a sex offender after pleading guilty to attempted rape in 1995 while a teenager. A lawsuit says Minaj tried to intimidate his victim into recanting.
A woman suing rapper Nicki Minaj’s husband over a 1994 incident to which he pleaded guilty to attempted rape has filed a new version of her complaint that includes more details about the underlying criminal case.
The allegations in the amended complaint are contained in earlier versions of the complaint, including allegations about Minaj calling the woman, Jennifer Hough, in 2020 to try to get her to recant and sending people to Hough’s house.
Some details are new to the complaint, such as excerpts from the transcript of Petty’s plea and sentencing hearing in May 1995.
Everything already was in the public realm, however: Hough’s lawyer filed the exhibits in August with a motion seeking to amend or correct his complaint.
Petty’s lawyer said in an opposition brief filed in August that Hough wanted to amend her complaint “to feed her and her counsel’s desire and need for publicity and to attempt to publicly embarrass Mr. Petty (and his celebrity wife).”
“Plaintiff publicly filed the unnecessary sixteen ‘supplemental’ Exhibits with her letter motion, fourteen of which concerned Mr. Petty’s arrest in 1994. Plaintiff and her counsel then gave interviews to the media and made numerous posts on social media concerning the Exhibits and the proposed Second Amended Complaint,” according to the letter from attorney Steven D. Isser of New York City. “That it is not necessary to include such ‘evidence’ attached to a complaint, combined with Plaintiff and her counsel’s public statements concerning the ‘evidence’ and Proposed Amendment, demonstrates that Plaintiff’s true purpose in making the motion was in bad faith.”
Read Isser’s full filing here.
The amended complaint filed Saturday in the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn officially incorporates the exhibits into the lawsuit, first filed in August 2021, per the order of U.S. Magistrate Judge James Cho, who ruled in October it was too late to add a new claim but authorized Hough to amend her complaint to include the information she’d obtained from the Queen District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted Petty in 1994.
“Since the additional allegations and exhibits arise from defendant’s criminal prosecution, which resulted in his pleading guilty to the attempted rape of plaintiff, the amendments are based on facts that should have been known to defendant,” according to Judge Cho’s 11-page order. “In any event, discovery is still open and no trial date has been set in this action. Accordingly, there is no risk of unfair surprise or undue prejudice to defendant.”
Hough’s lawyer, Tyrone Blackburn, signed his amended complaint on Dec. 13. It showed up in the case file today.
Currently, Petty is on house arrest under an agreement with the U.S. Probation Office approved by U.S. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald of the Central District of California in Los Angeles in September. He’s been on federal probation since pleading guilty in 2021 to failing to register as a sex offender.
Petty agreed to serve up to 120 days “for making threatening remarks toward a specific individual while in the company of someone with a criminal record,” according to Fitzgerald order. The individual is rapper Offset, and the “threatening remarks” were captured in a video that made the rounds on social media before the order was filed.
Read the new amended complaint against Petty here. Minaj was originally a defendant on witness intimidation and harassment claims, but Blackburn voluntarily dismissed her in 2022.
Most of the exhibits are available for free through the Courtlistener file, which you can access here.
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