Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is suing Courtney Burgess, who claims he had sex tapes

Sean Combs, the singer facing human trafficking and sexual abuse charges, filed a defamation lawsuit on Wednesday against a man who said in an interview that he was given a video showing Mr. Combs with celebrity sex, including attacking the people he claimed to have appeared. to be a minor.

The man, Courtney Burgess, emerged last year as a person in an Internet conversation about Mr. Combs, who is awaiting trial in a Brooklyn jail. Appearing on true crime podcasts and in interviews on the NewsNation cable network, Mr. Burgess says he has video of the encounters; in October, he said he testified before a grand jury considering additional charges against Mr. Combs.

Mr. Combs’ lawsuit claims no such video exists and accuses Mr. Burgess of “creating outlandish claims and fueling baseless speculation” about him. He says the allegations caused serious harm to Mr. Combs and tainted the panel of judges who will eventually consider federal charges against him.

“People who heard and believed the defendants’ lies accused Combs, on social media that is consumed by hundreds of millions of viewers every day, as a ‘snake’ and a pedophile,” said the lawsuit.

Reached by phone on Wednesday, Mr. Burgess said, “I stand by my word.”

“He had a lot of courage to want to sue someone when he was going to rot in jail for everything he did,” he said.

In addition to the criminal charges, Mr. Combs faces more than 30 civil lawsuits accusing him of sexual assault. He pleaded not guilty to the charges and his attorney said he “has never had sexual intercourse with anyone – adult or minor, male or female.”

Mr. Combs’ lawsuit, filed in Manhattan Federal Court, is the first by a music executive to file a lawsuit against him since the flood began more than a year ago.

His suit also makes defamation claims against a lawyer who represented Mr. Burgess, Ariel Mitchell-Kidd, who discussed the alleged videos on NewsNation, and names the network’s owner. network, Nexstar Media, will be charged.

In a statement, Ms. Mitchell-Kidd called the lawsuit “a sad ploy to silence victims and victims’ advocates.” He went on to say, “I look forward to challenging and ensuring that the court punishes not only Diddy, but also his attorneys who filed this unfortunate lawsuit for this frivolous and frivolous request.”

On the day Mr. Burgess said he was testifying before a Manhattan grand jury, he appeared on the NewsNation program with Ms. Mitchell-Kidd and confirmed that “two or three” of the popular in the videos seems to be underage.

Representatives for Nexstar and NewsNation did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.

Mr. Burgess, who admitted that he did not personally know Mr. Combs, said he believed the source of the video was Kim Porter, the woman Mr. Combs for many years and with them. mogul had three children. He said he obtained the videos through an intermediary, along with a manuscript he described as a rough draft of Ms Porter’s memoir, which was sold as a 59-page book on Amazon. Relatives and friends of Ms. Porter, who died in 2018, dismissed it as fiction, and Amazon pulled the book from its website.

The lawsuit accuses Mr. Burgess of profiting from what he calls “fake memories” and using false claims to become famous on the Internet.

Mr. Burgess said he testified before the grand jury that he threw away the original flash drive containing the videos, but his phone and email may have contained copies as well. Ms Mitchell-Kidd said the government confiscated Mr Burgess’s mobile phone.

The suit said that Mr. Ms. Mitchell-Kidd was Burgess in a recent documentary about Mr. Combs called “The Making of a Bad Boy,” which began airing on the Peacock this month. In the cross-examination, Ms. Mitchell-Kidd said that Mr. Burgess provided the video to the government — a statement that, Mr. Combs’ lawyer said, she knew was false because “there is no such video.”

Mr. Combs is scheduled to go on trial in May on charges that he ran a criminal “enterprise” responsible for arranging drugged and forced sex known as “freak-offs.” He said all sex was consensual.