Sean “Diddy” Combs sues Courtney Burgess, who said he had sex tapes

Sean Combs, the music mogul accused of sex trafficking and racketeering, filed a defamation lawsuit Wednesday against a man who said in interviews that he was given videos showing Mr. Combs having sex with celebrities, including attacks on people he believed were appearing. be a minor.

The man, Courtney Burgess, emerged last year as a figure in growing Internet chatter about Mr. Combs, who is awaiting trial in a Brooklyn jail. In appearances on true crime podcasts and in an interview on the cable network NewsNation, Mr. Burgess said he had videos of the encounters; in October, he said he testified before a grand jury considering additional charges against Mr. Combs.

Mr. Combs’s lawsuit claims that no such videos exist and accuses Mr. Burgess of “fabricating wild claims and fanning baseless speculation” about him. He says the allegations have caused serious damage to Mr. Combs’ reputation and tainted the jury pool that will eventually consider the federal charges against him.

“People who heard and believed Defendants’ lies accused Combs, on social media consumed by hundreds of millions of viewers each day, of being a debauched ‘monster’ and a pedophile,” the lawsuit states.

Reached by telephone on Wednesday, Mr. Burgess said: “I keep my word. »

“He had a lot of nerve to want to sue someone when he was going to rot in prison for everything he had done,” he said.

In addition to the criminal charges, Mr. Combs faces more than 30 civil lawsuits in which he has been accused of sexual assault. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him and his lawyers have said he has “never sexually assaulted anyone, adult or minor, man or woman.”