A woman accused the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs of drugging and raping her at his recording studio in Manhattan in 2001 in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, saying that she learned last year that the assault had been recorded and shown to others.
The lawsuit was filed about a week after Mr. Combs, 54, was arrested on charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, to which he has pleaded not guilty. Six other women have accused Mr. Combs of sexual assault in lawsuits in the past year, while three additional lawsuits have accused him of sexual misconduct.
The plaintiff in the suit filed on Tuesday, Thalia Graves, said in her complaint that she was 25 at the time of the assault and knew Mr. Combs through her boyfriend at the time, who was working for Bad Boy, Mr. Combs’s record label. The lawsuit said that in or around the summer of 2001, Mr. Combs called her and asked to meet in person. After arriving in an S.U.V. to pick her up, the lawsuit said, he offered her a glass of wine that made her feel “lightheaded, dizzy and physically weak.”
When they arrived at the recording studio, the suit said, Ms. Graves lost consciousness and later woke up to find herself naked and her hands tied behind her back with “what felt like a plastic grocery bag.” She said in the court filing that a bodyguard of Mr. Combs’s had lifted her up and slammed her down onto a table, after which she recalled Mr. Combs raping her.
“Plaintiff was unable to move, totally overpowered physically, in addition to being drugged and bound,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Manhattan.
Representatives for Mr. Combs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Graves’s suit also names the bodyguard, Joseph Sherman, as a defendant, saying that he assaulted her and forced her to give him oral sex. Mr. Sherman said in an interview that he stopped working with Bad Boy in 1999 and had “nothing to do” with Mr. Combs by 2001.
“I categorically — a trillion times — deny it,” Mr. Sherman said. “Not only do I deny it, I don’t know who she is. I’ve never seen this woman.”
Mr. Sherman said in the interview that Ms. Graves had reached out to him via social media months ago. He said he responded that he had no idea what she was talking about.
In Mr. Combs’s criminal case, prosecutors accused him of a “decades-long pattern” of physical and sexual violence facilitated by an array of aides. His lawyers have vehemently denied the charges in the indictment, calling him an “innocent man.”
The center of the case mirrors a lawsuit filed by the singer Cassie, a former girlfriend of Mr. Combs’s whose full name is Casandra Ventura. Mr. Combs quickly settled Ms. Ventura’s suit in November but has been fighting the other lawsuits in court, with his lawyers portraying the plaintiffs as people who are crafting false claims to try to get their own settlements.
“Everyone lined up to get their checks,” one of his lawyers, Marc Agnifilo, said of the civil suits in a court hearing last week.
Ms. Graves said in her lawsuit that her former boyfriend told her shortly after Cassie filed her lawsuit that Mr. Combs and Mr. Sherman had shown him and other employees footage of Ms. Graves being raped years earlier. She then reached out to Mr. Sherman, the lawsuit said, hoping to convince him to destroy the tape or give it to her.
It was unclear whether any footage of an encounter between Mr. Combs and Ms. Graves currently exists. Gloria Allred, a lawyer for Ms. Graves, said at a news conference on Tuesday that the video “may still be out there being viewed,” and the lawsuit accuses the defendants of continuing “to show the video of the rape to others over the years.”
Ms. Allred declined to say whether her client had been involved in the criminal case against Mr. Combs.
Ms. Graves said at the news conference that the incarceration of Mr. Combs, who is being housed in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn after being denied bail, gave her a “temporary feeling of relief.”
Her lawsuit was filed under New York City’s Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law, which has become a last resort for accusers looking to revive older claims. The suit also cites laws around unlawful dissemination of pornography.
Source: India Today