The typical playbook for a defense lawyer representing a celebrity facing damaging accusations often features a sharply worded denial, promises to eventually reveal all at trial, and perhaps a strategically placed tabloid pushback story.
But lawyers defending the music mogul Sean Combs against a cascade of civil sexual misconduct claims have opened up a new strategic front: TikTok.
On Tuesday, the singer Dawn Richard filed a new lawsuit against Mr. Combs, accusing him of threatening and groping her. Mr. Combs’s representatives responded with a somewhat traditional statement that called the lawsuit a “series of false claims” brought “in the hopes of trying to get a payday.”
Then Teny Geragos hit TikTok. “All right, here we go again, Diddy sued by a former bandmate; I’m his lawyer and here’s why you should care,” Ms. Geragos, a member of the Combs defense team, said in a TikTok posted on Wednesday.
Employing a popular format in which a creator speaks in front of various screenshots that help illustrate a point, Ms. Geragos walked viewers through several examples of Ms. Richard, who performed with the groups Danity Kane and Diddy — Dirty Money, expressing support for Mr. Combs. She pointed — literally — to friendly text messages between the plaintiff and defendant in 2020 discussing a possible future collaboration and played a clip from a video interview in which Ms. Richard spoke positively about her time working with Mr. Combs. One of the mogul’s sons, Justin Combs, shared the video to his Instagram.
“We want to be able to respond to allegations where people are forming opinions,” Ms. Geragos said in an interview, noting that she is in her 30s and has grown up around social media. “I see where all of the misinformation spreads. I see it happening on people’s phones and in short one-minute clips.”
In a statement, Lisa Bloom, a lawyer for Ms. Richard, sharply criticized the video, saying that it is common for women to “continue working with abusers” for some period of time. “The floating head TikTok ‘criminal defense’ lawyer may not understand that this is not a legal defense in a civil case,” she added.
In recent months, lawyers for Mr. Combs, who is also facing a federal investigation, have filed dozens of pages of legal documents arguing for the dismissal of several sexual misconduct lawsuits. But this week, as new cases circulated in the news media, his legal team opened an approach aimed at persuading the public.
Particularly talkative defense lawyers on high-profile cases will sometimes post comments on social media or speak with journalists. In an era of viral livestreamed trials such as the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard case in 2022, some have even become internet characters in their own right. On the hashtag #lawyersoftiktok, attorneys post videos offering general legal advice, celebrating victories and sometimes walking viewers through a day in the life of an attorney.
But a TikTok video by a lawyer in a format typically used for movie reviews or dissections of celebrity gossip? That is highly unusual.
“I haven’t seen attorneys turn to this type of social media to argue their case,” said Julie Rendelman, a criminal defense lawyer in New York. “This is trying to impact the court of public opinion.”
The first video that Ms. Geragos posted this week addressed a case out of Michigan in which an inmate who has been convicted of criminal sexual conduct sued Mr. Combs, alleging that the rap impresario drugged and sexually assaulted him in 1997 in Detroit. This week, a judge granted the plaintiff, Derrick Lee Cardello-Smith, a $100 million default judgment after Mr. Combs’s lawyers did not reply to the lawsuit or show up in court. In an initial statement, a lawyer for Mr. Combs said that his client had never heard of Mr. Cardello-Smith and had not been served with his lawsuit, meaning that he could not have properly responded in court.
The response on TikTok was more informal.
“All right, Diddy just got hit with a $100 million dollar default judgment yesterday to a guy who’s currently sitting in jail,” said Ms. Geragos, whose father is the high-profile defense lawyer Mark Geragos. Then she added, “let me break down two reasons why this is absolutely not going to hold.”
Speaking in front of a backdrop of court filings and the plaintiff’s online inmate profile, Ms. Geragos explained Mr. Cardello-Smith’s criminal history — “not the most credible guy,” she said — and pulled up a document that Mr. Cardello-Smith put forward as proof that he had indeed served Mr. Combs with his lawsuit.
“So he claims that he served Mr. Combs at an address that Mr. Combs hasn’t lived at in four years,” she said in the video, “yet most importantly it wasn’t signed by anybody with a signature that looks remotely like Sean Combs. So what’s next? Combs is going to file a motion to get this swiftly vacated and the $100 million-dollar judgment thrown out of court.”
Plenty of defense lawyers favor a more conservative approach.
Richard C. Schoenstein, a lawyer who represented Robert De Niro at trial last year, said he tends to shy away from making public statements before a trial concludes, partly because a defendant can be cross-examined on their lawyer’s comments and because statements outside of court filings are not protected from defamation lawsuits.
“My advice to the client is usually that we’re focused on the jury, we’re focused on the court,” he said.
There are risks to a more verbose strategy, and the videos by Mr. Combs’s lawyer have been posting are carefully curated to focus more on publicly available pieces of documentation like court filings — on TikTok, one might call them receipts — than rhetoric.
Ms. Geragos said in the interview that before she started posting the TikToks she consulted local rules on lawyer conduct and did her own investigation into the cases: “I don’t see the difference here in doing this video versus going on TV,” she said. “No one would bat an eye if I had just gone on NewsNation or CNN.”
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