Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs has filed a defamation lawsuit against US news network NewsNation and Courtney Burgess, who has claimed he has videos in which Combs is seen sexually assaulting celebrities and minors. “No such tapes exist”, Combs insists in his new lawsuit.
By making those claims, Burgess - and networks like NewsNation that provide him with a platform - have been “fuelling a media frenzy”, where “outlandish claims” and “baseless speculation” is pushed to a global audience that “feasts at the all-you-can-eat buffet of wild lies and conspiracy theories”, says Combs’ legal filing.
Of course, media interest in Combs is already very high as a result of the plethora of lawsuits that accuse him of sexual assault, not to mention the criminal charges for racketeering and sex trafficking. However, that doesn’t excuse the “blatant falsehoods” being pushed out by Burgess and his allies in the media, Combs’ lawyers argue in the defamation suit.
Combs himself is currently in jail, having been repeatedly denied bail as he awaits trial on those sex trafficking charges. His new lawsuit brings the number of pop star defamation lawsuits filed so far this year, all relating to allegations of sexual misconduct, to three.
Chris Brown is suing the makers of a documentary in which he was accused of raping a woman at a Combs-hosted party in 2020. Meanwhile Drake is suing Universal Music over the lyrics in the Kendrick Lamar track ‘Not Like Us’, which the major released, and which accuses Drake of being a pedophile.
Combs’ defamation suit also names Burgess’s lawyer, Ariel Mitchell, as a co-defendant. The lawsuit says that, because the tapes Burgess claims to own don’t exist, and “because Mitchell never saw any video depicting Mr Combs sexually abusing anyone, adult or minor”, the attorney’s “many false assertions that Burgess possessed such videos were either knowingly blatant falsehoods or recklessly false statements made as the direct result of Mitchell’s inexcusable failure to investigate her client’s outrageous lies”.