Sean "Diddy" Combs, the music mogul facing sex trafficking and racketeering charges, filed a defamation lawsuit Wednesday against a man who said in interviews that he had been given videos that showed Combs in sexual encounters with celebrities, including assaults of people he said appeared to be minors.
The man, Courtney Burgess, surfaced last year as a character in the ballooning internet chatter about Combs, who is awaiting trial in a New York City jail. During appearances on true crime podcasts and in an interview on the cable network NewsNation, Burgess said he had videos of the encounters; in October, he said he testified in front of a grand jury considering additional charges against Combs.
Combs' lawsuit asserts that such videos do not exist and accuses Burgess of "fabricating outlandish claims and stirring up baseless speculation" about him. It says the allegations have caused Combs severe reputational harm and have tainted the pool of jurors who will eventually consider federal charges against him.
"People who heard and believed Defendants' lies have accused Combs, on social media that is consumed by hundreds of millions of viewers each and every day, of being a debauched 'monster' and a paedophile," the suit says.
Reached by phone Wednesday, Burgess said, "I'm standing by my word."
"He had a lot of nerve to want to sue somebody when he's going to rot in jail for all of the things he's done," he said.
In addition to the criminal charges, Combs faces more than 30 civil suits in which he has been accused of sexual assault. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and his lawyers have said that he has "never sexually assaulted anyone — adult or minor, man or woman."
Combs' suit, filed in United States District Court in Manhattan, is the first that the music executive has filed himself since a deluge of claims against him began more than a year ago.
His suit also makes defamation claims against a lawyer who has represented Burgess, Ariel Mitchell-Kidd, who discussed the supposed videos on NewsNation, and names the television network's owner, Nexstar Media, as a defendant.
In a statement, Mitchell-Kidd called the lawsuit a "pathetic ploy to silence victims and people who stand up for victims." She went on to say: "I look forward to countersuing and ensuring the court punishes not only Diddy but also his lawyers who filed this pathetic lawsuit for this frivolous and meritless filing."
On the day that Burgess said he testified before a grand jury in Manhattan, he appeared on a NewsNation program alongside Mitchell-Kidd and asserted that "two to three" of the celebrities in the videos appeared to be possibly underage.
Representatives for Nexstar and NewsNation did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the lawsuit.
Burgess, who has acknowledged that he did not know Combs personally, has said that he believed the source of the video footage was Kim Porter, the woman Combs was in a serious relationship with for many years and with whom the mogul had three children. He said that he received the videos through an intermediary, along with a manuscript of what he described as a rough draft of Porter's memoir, which was later sold as a 59-page book on Amazon. Relatives and friends of Porter, who died in 2018, dismissed it as a fabrication, and Amazon pulled the book from its website.
The suit accuses Burgess of profiting from what it called a “fake memoir” and leveraging false claims into internet fame.
Burgess has said he testified in front of the grand jury that he had disposed of the original flash drives containing the videos, but that his phone and email may have also contained copies. Mitchell-Kidd said the government recovered Burgess’ phone.
The suit says Mitchell-Kidd repeated Burgess' claims in a recent documentary about Combs called "The Making of a Bad Boy," which began streaming on Peacock this month. In the documentary, Mitchell-Kidd said Burgess handed the video over to the government — a statement that, Combs' lawyers contend, she knew was false because "no such video exists."
Combs is scheduled to stand trial in May on charges that he ran a criminal "enterprise" that was responsible for coordinating drug-fuelled and coercive sexual encounters called “freak-offs.” He contends that all sexual encounters were consensual.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
