A hair and make-up artist has accused the country singer Garth Brooks of sexual assault and battery in a civil lawsuit filed in Los Angeles, claims the musician has strongly denied.
The anonymous accuser, referred to in the complaint as “Jane Roe”, alleges that Brooks raped her during a work trip to Los Angeles in 2019, and that he repeatedly groped her and made sexually explicit comments while she was doing his hair or make-up throughout 2019.
In a statement, Brooks called the allegations “lies” and said he was “incapable” of the behaviour he was accused of committing.
“I trust the system, I do not fear the truth, and I am not the man they have painted me to be,” he said.
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Roe, the accuser in the case, is represented in the case by Douglas Wigdor, an attorney known as a “leading #MeToo lawyer” who previously represented women who accused Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly and Joe Biden of sexual misconduct.
Wigdor and the plaintiff’s other lawyers allege that Brooks took advantage of the make-up artist while she was experiencing financial hardship, first offering her more frequent paid work, and then engaging in a pattern of sexual harassment and sexual assault, which they describe in the lawsuit in graphic detail.
“The complaint filed today demonstrates that sexual predators exist not only in corporate America, Hollywood and in the rap and rock’n’roll industries but also in the world of country music,” Wigdor and two other attorneys for the plaintiff, Jeanne Christensen and Hayley Baker, said in a statement.
In his statement on Thursday and in a separate lawsuit he filed in Mississippi in September, Brooks said the allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment were false and designed to extort money from him.
“For the last two months, I have been hassled to no end with threats, lies, and tragic tales of what my future would be if I did not write a check for many millions of dollars. It has been like having a loaded gun waved in my face,” Brooks said in a statement.
“Hush money, no matter how much or how little, is still hush money. In my mind, that means I am admitting to behaviour I am incapable of – ugly acts no human should ever do to another.”
According to her California complaint, the woman accusing Brooks of sexual assault is a stylist who has worked in the music industry for more than 30 years, including doing hair and make-up for celebrities appearing in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and other publications. She was first hired in 1999 to do hair and make-up for Trisha Yearwood, another country music star and Brooks’s wife, and began to do the same for Brooks in 2017.
In the complaint, the woman alleges that Brooks forcefully raped her in a Los Angeles hotel room in May 2019, when she accompanied him from Nashville to California for a tribute performance honouring R&B legend Sam Moore. Afterwards, she did his make-up so he could get to the event on time, the complaint alleges.
After that assault, she had to visit her OB-GYN because of her injuries, and the assault also left her with severe back and neck pain and emotional trauma, according to the complaint.
Over the following months, the woman alleges, Brooks continued to sexually harass her and assault her, including subjecting her to sexually explicit comments, and repeatedly groping her breasts, including while she was styling him for public appearances.
Brooks did this with such frequency “that it was inevitable that other employees of Brooks’s likely saw or heard instances of the unwanted physical groping of her breasts while she was styling his hair and doing his make-up”, the complaint alleges.
In 2020, during a styling session, Brooks “surreptitiously took her phone and deleted most of the text messages that he had sent to her containing explicit sexual content”, the complaint alleges.
Attorneys for “Jane Roe” said that Brooks filed a federal lawsuit against her in Mississippi last month, in an attempt to block her from publicising her allegations against him.
CNN previously reported on a “highly unusual legal battle” in Mississippi, in which an anonymous celebrity plaintiff asked a federal court “to declare a sexual assault accuser’s allegations untrue and stop her from further publicising them”. The plaintiff in that case alleged that the accuser was “attempting to extort and defame him with ‘false allegations’ that would ‘irreparably harm’ his reputation and career”, CNN reported.
In his Mississippi complaint from September, which a representative for Brooks shared, Brooks said that “Jane Roe” had worked with him professionally as an independent contractor for “approximately fifteen years”.
His complaint alleged that when she moved to Mississippi in early 2020, she encountered financial difficulties and asked him for help, and that he “complied out of loyalty, friendship, and a desire to improve Defendant’s condition”.
Over time, her “demands for financial assistance only increased”, Brooks’ complaint alleges, “with Defendant ultimately asking Plaintiff for salaried employment and medical benefits”. When Brooks declined to provide these, the woman “responded with false and outrageous allegations of sexual misconduct”.
In his September complaint, Brooks claims that he first learned of “Jane Roe’s” allegations of sexual assault and misconduct in a 17 July letter from her, and said that none of the allegations had any basis in fact.
His complaint alleges that her July letter was accompanied by a “draft civil complaint”, and that Roe “threatened” to “publicly file” the complaint unless he “agreed to pay [her] millions of dollars not to file the suit”.
According to his complaint, her accusations against him in the 17 July letter initially included “a belief that Plaintiff planned to hire someone to murder her”.
“I want to play music tonight. I want to continue our good deeds going forward. It breaks my heart these wonderful things are in question now,” Brooks said in the statement on Thursday, after the allegations were made public.
In her complaint, the woman’s lawyers describe Brooks’s anonymous Mississippi lawsuit as an attempt to bully his accuser, and say he claimed she was threatening to file a complaint against him in California “only because Brooks refused to give her a raise and pay for health insurance”. – The Guardian
