Garth Brooks, the country superstar, has named the woman who, as Jane Roe, accused him of rape and sexual assault in a bombshell lawsuit last week.
In a court filing in Mississippi on Tuesday, lawyers for Mr. Brooks portrayed the star as “the victim of a shakedown” and said the woman’s lawyers had “flouted” the authority of a judge in a related case.
Litigation over the woman’s accusations began last month with a lawsuit that was filed anonymously — as John Doe v. Jane Roe — in federal court in Mississippi. The plaintiff, identified only as “a celebrity and public figure who resides in Tennessee,” said that lawyers for a woman had approached him in July with what he described as false allegations of sexual assault, and that they would sue Mr. Brooks unless he gave the woman “a multimillion-dollar payment.” The man asked the Mississippi judge to preserve the parties’ anonymity and declare that the woman’s accusations were false.
In a response, lawyers for the woman said they intended to sue the man in California, saying that “Ms. Roe respectfully requests that she may commence her California action as she intended to do, and use Mr. Doe’s name, absent objection from this Honorable Court.”
The court did not act, and two days later the woman filed her lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court, naming Mr. Brooks but not herself. The suit accused Mr. Brooks of raping her in a Los Angeles hotel room in 2019, and of subjecting her to repeated unwanted sexual advances for about two years. The woman described herself as a hair and makeup stylist who had worked with Mr. Brooks’s wife, the country singer Trisha Yearwood, since 1999, and had begun working regularly for Mr. Brooks in 2017.
The suit drew wide coverage in the news media, and its portrayal of Mr. Brooks ran counter to the positive public image he had cultivated for decades.
In Mr. Brooks’s initial filing in Mississippi, before his name was disclosed, he argued that he should be able to proceed anonymously in part because the allegation could cause “irreparable damage” to his “well-earned good reputation.”
In a statement last week, after the woman named him in her suit, Mr. Brooks said, in part: “Hush money, no matter how much or how little, is still hush money. In my mind, that means I am admitting to behavior I am incapable of — ugly acts no human should ever do to another.”
He added: “I trust the system, I do not fear the truth, and I am not the man they have painted me to be.”
In the new filing in Mississippi, lawyers for Mr. Brooks asked for compensatory and punitive damages, and for an injunction prohibiting the woman “from continuing her extortionate behavior and from further publicizing her false allegations.”
Douglas H. Wigdor, the woman’s lawyer, said in a statement that his firm would be “moving for maximum sanctions” against Mr. Brooks immediately.
“Garth Brooks just revealed his true self,” Mr. Wigdor said. “Out of spite and to punish he publicly named a rape victim. With no legal justification Brooks outed her because he thinks the laws don’t apply to him.”
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