John Jefferson
Sean “Diddy” Combs has slammed producer Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones’s lawsuit as “countless tall tales” as his lawyers asked a judge to dismiss the case.
Lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the $30 million lawsuit on Monday, accusing the case of being “salacious” and “fail[ing] to state a single viable claim.”
Jones, who worked for the rapper between September 2022 and November 2023, alleges Combs sexually harassed, drugged and threatened him for more than a year.
The lawsuit also alleges that Combs — formerly known as Puff Daddy and P. Diddy — regularly hosted “sex-trafficking parties” with underage women and illegal drugs, and implies record label executives who looked the other way financially benefited from access to celebrities and dignitaries.
But hitting back at the allegations, lawyers for Combs argue Jones’s “true purpose is to generate media hype and exploit it to extract a settlement.”
“Jones’ Second Amended Complaint is his third attempt to dress up a run of the mill commercial disagreement as a salacious RICO conspiracy,” the motion said. “Running to nearly 100 pages, it includes countless tall tales, shameless celebrity namedrops, and irrelevant images.”
The motion was filed in United States District Court in the Southern District of New York by Manhattan-based law firm Sher Tremonte.
Combs’s lawyer, Erica Wolff, said in a statement: “Mr. Jones’s lawsuit is pure fiction — a shameless attempt to create media hype and extract a quick settlement. There was no RICO conspiracy and Mr. Jones was not threatened, groomed, assaulted or trafficked. We look forward to proving — in a court of law — that all of Mr. Jones’s claims are made up and must be dismissed.”
The motion also says Jones’s attorney, Tyrone Blackburn, has been referred to the court’s grievance committee for engaging in a “pattern” of “improperly fil[ing] cases in federal court to garner media attention, embarrass defendants with salacious allegations, and pressure defendants to settle quickly.”
Blackburn responded: “If their client does not engage in salacious behavior, I would not have anything salacious to file. I pick my clients; I do not pick their facts.”
He told Deadline in a statement: “This is nothing more than a billing exercise by Sean Combs’ latest set of lawyers. It is a weak attempt to fill their pockets before he is indicted, and they decide to haul ass, just like his five previous lawyers did.”
Jones has until September 9 to respond to the motion to dismiss.
Combs, a music mogul credited with helping launch the careers of some of the biggest stars in recent years, faces multiple civil lawsuits accusing him of sex trafficking, sexual abuse and rape.
Federal agents with US Homeland Security raided two of the rapper’s houses in Los Angeles and Miami on March 25 this year as he faces a string of varying accusations.
Combs, 54, has strongly denied all of the allegations against him. His attorneys have branded the lawsuits and their accusations as money grabs, “baseless” or “sickening.”
The entertainer has not been formally charged or accused by federal prosecutors of any crime.
On May 17, surveillence footage captured at a hotel in Los Angeles in March 2016 showed Diddy chasing his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura down the hallway before attacking her by the elevators. He then attempts to drag her back to his hotel room.
The following day, he shared an apology video to Instagram saying his behaviour was “inexcusable” and that he took “full responsibility for his actions in the video.”
The slew of allegations in lawsuits against Combs date as far back as the 1990s, when he founded his own record label, Bad Boy Records.
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