Sean Combs, who is facing charges of sex trafficking and fraud, filed a defamation lawsuit Wednesday against a man who said in interviews that he had been given videos in which Mr. Combs was shown having sexual encounters with celebrities, including assaults on them, he said. Being a minor
The man, Courtney Burgess, emerged last year as a character in the Internet chatter about Mr. Combs, who is awaiting trial in a Brooklyn jail. During appearances on true crime podcasts and in an interview on the cable network News Nation, Mr. Burgess said he had videos of the encounters. In October, she said she testified before a grand jury considering additional charges against Mr. Combs.
Mr. Coombs’ lawsuit insists that no such videos exist and accuses Mr. Burgess of “making outlandish claims and baseless speculation” about them. It says the allegations have seriously damaged Mr. Coombs’ reputation and tainted the pool of jurors who will eventually consider federal charges against him.
“Those who heard and believed the defendants’ lies have taken to social media to accuse Combs, who is used by millions of viewers every day, of being an evil ‘monster’ and a pedo,” the lawsuit states. to be filed,” the lawsuit states.
Reached by phone on Wednesday, Mr. Burgess said, “I stand by my word.”
“He had a lot of nerve to want to sue somebody when he’s going to rot in jail for all the things he’s done,” she said.
In addition to the criminal charges, Mr. Combs faces more than 30 civil lawsuits accusing him of sexual assault. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and his lawyers have said he “never sexually assaulted anyone – adult or minor, male or female.”
Mr. Combs’ lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, is the first the music executive has filed against himself since the flood of claims against him began more than a year ago.
His suit also claims defamation against a lawyer who represented Mr. Burgess, Ariel Mitchell Kidd. discussed The alleged videos on NewsNation, and the owner of the television network Nextar Media, are named as defendants.
In a statement, Ms Mitchell-Kidd called the trial “a pathetic ploy to silence victims and those who stand up for victims”. He added: “I look forward to fighting this and ensuring that the court not only punishes Dadi but also his lawyers who filed this pathetic case for frivolous and frivolous filing. Filed.”
On the day Mr. Burgess said he testified before a grand jury in Manhattan, he appeared. In a program of News Nation Mrs. Mitchell, along with Kidd, asserted that “two to three” celebrities in the videos appear to be possibly underage.
Representatives for Nexstar and NewsNation did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the lawsuit.
Mr. Burgess, who has admitted he did not know Mr. Coombs personally, has said he believed the source of the video footage was Kim Porter, the woman with whom Mr. Coombs had been in a serious relationship for several years. Mughal had three children with He said he had received the videos through an intermediary, along with a manuscript of what he described as a rough draft of Ms. Porter’s memoir, which was later posted on Amazon at 59 pages. was sold as a book. Relatives and friends of Ms Porter, who died in 2018, dismissed it as a fabrication, and Amazon pulled the book from its website.
The lawsuit accuses Mr. Burgess of profiting from what he called a “fake memory” and gaining internet fame by exploiting false claims.
Mr. Burgess has said he testified before the grand jury that he had disposed of the original flash drives containing the videos, but that he may have had copies on his phone and email. Ms Mitchell-Kidd said the government had recovered Mr Burgess’s phone.
Miss Mitchell Kidd repeated Mr. Burgess’s claims about Mr. Coombs in a recent documentary called “The Making of a Bad Boy,” which began airing on Peacock this month, the lawsuit said. In the documentary, Ms. Mitchell-Kidd said that Mr. Burgess had turned over the video to the government — a statement that, Mr. Combs’ lawyers claim, she knew to be false because “no such video exists. is.”
Mr Coombs is due to go on trial in May on charges he ran a criminal “enterprise” that involved drug-fuelled and forced sexual encounters called “freak-offs”. He claims that all sexual encounters were consensual.
