Lawyers for Sean Combs filed court papers on Monday seeking the dismissal of a civil suit by a music producer who accused Mr. Combs of making unwanted sexual contact, arguing that the lawsuit was baseless and “replete with far-fetched tales of misconduct.”
The filing, in Federal District Court in Manhattan, is the latest effort by the hip-hop impresario’s legal team to dismiss a series of recent lawsuits that accuse him of sexual assault and misconduct. The suit by Rodney Jones Jr., a music producer who worked on Mr. Combs’s most recent album, accuses Mr. Combs of groping him and forcing him to solicit prostitutes; he also alleges that Mr. Combs threatened him with violence.
In their response, lawyers for Mr. Combs wrote that Mr. Jones’s claims lack basic details, including where and when the alleged groping occurred, along with how, exactly, Mr. Combs pressured him into hiring prostitutes.
“Such vague allegations fall well short of federal pleading standards,” wrote one of the lawyers, Erica A. Wolff, who argued that the real purpose of the lawsuit is to “generate media hype and exploit it to extract a settlement.”
One threat of violence that the lawsuit alleges was that Mr. Combs once threatened to “eat Mr. Jones’s face,” but the exact context for the comment was unclear in Mr. Jones’s suit, a 98-page document that details a litany of allegations from his time as a part of Mr. Combs’s entourage.
Mr. Jones’s lawyer, Tyrone A. Blackburn, called the filing a “desperate Hail Mary attempt.”
“Nothing in this complaint is far-fetched,” he said. “Nothing in this complaint is too vague.”
The cascade of claims filed against Mr. Combs, the hip-hop mogul who has been called Puff Daddy and Diddy, followed a lawsuit by his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, who accused him of years of physical and sexual abuse. That lawsuit was settled in one day, but in the months that followed, Mr. Combs was sued by five other women who accused him of sexually assaulting them in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Mr. Combs’s legal team has been fighting those lawsuits in federal and state court, and he has denied the allegations. One of the cases was filed anonymously by a woman who accused Mr. Combs and two other men of gang raping her when she was 17. A judge is currently weighing whether to allow the suit to continue in light of legal objections from Mr. Combs; in a win for his team, the judge has ruled that if the case does proceed, the plaintiff will have to reveal her name.
The legal back-and-forth over the lawsuits is separate from the ongoing federal investigation into Mr. Combs’s conduct, which became publicly visible in March when federal agents raided his homes in Los Angeles and Miami Beach, Fla.
In court papers, Mr. Combs’s lawyers have raised questions about the conduct of Mr. Blackburn, who represents Mr. Jones and other plaintiffs. They have pointed to commentary from a federal judge in a separate case who wrote in an order this year that Mr. Blackburn had a pattern of improperly filing cases in federal court to “garner media attention, embarrass defendants with salacious allegations and pressure defendants to settle quickly.” Mr. Blackburn objected to the judge’s assessment and refiled the case in state court, where it is pending.
Mr. Blackburn also refiled a case against Mr. Combs, changing the venue from New York to New Jersey because, he wrote in a court filing, he and his client received new information that indicated she had been initially mistaken about the location of the alleged 1990 encounter. The plaintiff, a woman named Liza Gardner, accused Mr. Combs of coercing her into sex and later choking her so hard she passed out; Mr. Combs denied the allegations through a lawyer.
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