Jennifer Hough

Just a week after it was reported that Jennifer Hough had dropped her harassment lawsuit against Nicki Minaj, a new development reveals that she intends to refile the case in California. According to Rolling Stone, Hough’s lawyer told a federal magistrate judge that the only reason they’d withdrawn their case against the rapper — which was filed in the Eastern District of New York — was to ensure that the case was tried in the correct jurisdiction.

The lawyer, Seven N. Gordon, said, “We plan to refile it in a court with proper jurisdiction.” Judge James R. Cho confirmed that Gordon intended to also refile the case against Kenneth Petty, Nicki’s husband, asking, “If you intend to refile the action in another jurisdiction, do you intend this case to follow as well?” However, Gordon said that consolidation of the harassment cases would depend on the outcome of Hough’s request for a default judgment in the case against Petty, whom she’s also suing for sexual assault and intentional infliction of emotional distress from his 1995 conviction for attempted rape.

If awarded the default judgment, the sex assault claims would continue in New York, while the harassment claims would be consolidated in California, where Petty and Nicki Minaj now live. Meanwhile, Nicki’s lawyer again characterized the lawsuit as an attempted shakedown, telling Rolling Stone, “This is just a frivolous gambit to avoid a sanctions motion which I told them that I would be filing shortly and for which they refuse to set a schedule. As usual, they have decided to adopt a tactic without bothering to research the law. Had they done so, they would realize that re-filing their frivolous action in another jurisdiction will only result in another court sanctioning them.”

Hough filed the suit last August, saying that Nicki and Petty had tried to intimidate her into recanting her claim that Petty had tried to rape her at knifepoint in 1994 in an effort to get Petty removed from the sex offenders registry. Petty was indicted in 2020 for failing to register with his new address when the couple moved to LA in 2019. He pled guilty to failing to register around the time Hough filed her suit and is awaiting sentencing on March 30.

Six months after filing a harassment lawsuit against Nicki Minaj and her husband Kenneth Petty, TMZ reports that Jennifer Hough has voluntarily dropped Nicki from her suit . While TMZ’s source close to the case says that no money changed hands, the report does say that Petty remains a defendant. Nicki’s attorney, who previously called the lawsuit an attempt to shake down the rapper in connection with her husband’s ongoing legal issues stemming from Hough’s initial encounter in 1994.

Hough filed the suit in August of 2021, saying that the couple tried to pay her off, then bully her into recanting her previous testimony, which led to Petty’s conviction for first-degree attempted rape. Petty served his sentence but was added to the sex offender registry in the state of New York; however, when the couple moved to the Los Angeles area shortly after getting married in 2019, Petty was arrested for failing to register in California in March of 2020. According to Hough’s lawsuit, the couple’s representatives offered her substantial sums to recant, then resorted to veiled threats against her. She says she was forced to change her number and move, but Nicki’s lawyers contend that she contacted Nicki sometime after this to taunt her that US Marshalls were looking into the case.

Now Nicki’s lawyers say they will pursue repayment of her legal fees in what they call a “frivolous action” whose only goal was to get Nicki to pay up.

Nicki Minaj thinks that Jennifer Hough, the woman suing Nicki and her husband Kenneth Petty for harassment, is angling for a payday, according to legal documents the rap star has filed in response to the suit. TMZ reports that Nicki asks the court to sanction Hough, accusing her of falsely alleging harassment. In particular, Nicki’s lawyers maintain that Hough did not try to hide her number from Nicki as she previously stated and that Hough changed part of her story during a recent television appearance.

As evidence, Nicki’s attorneys claim that Hough texted Nicki after changing her number to tell her “US Marshalls are asking questions!!!” Meanwhile, regarding the interview, court documents filed by Hough say that her brother told her a lawyer representing Petty reached out to her with an offer of $500,000 to recant her 1995 testimony against him for sexual assault, while Nicki is also included in Hough’s harassment suit. Taken together, they believe these inconsistencies prove Hough is shaking down Nicki when her dispute should be with Nicki’s husband.

Hough filed suit against both this past August, accusing them of harassment, witness intimidation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. She said that the couple’s representatives have badgered her relentlessly since 2019, hoping to get Petty removed from the sex offenders list, where he must be registered since being convicted of raping Hough in 1995. Petty has since insisted that she was a “willing participant” and Nicki has filed a motion to have the case dismissed. Neither has addressed Nicki’s prior insistence that the victim was white (disproven, obviously), nor that she was dating Petty at the time of the incident (disputed by Hough), neither of which would absolve Petty of sexual assault even if they were true.

Nicki Minaj’s attorney has filed a motion to dismiss the complaint against her and her husband Kenneth Petty for failing to respond to the harassment case against them, according to Complex. Court documents filed last week address the motion filed by attorney Tyrone Blackburn on behalf of Jennifer Hough requesting a $20 million default judgment in Hough’s witness intimidation case against the couple. Hough sued the couple in August, saying they have been hounding her to recant her initial account of her alleged 1994 rape by Petty, for which he served a decade in prison.

Hough says that ever since Nicki Minaj and Kenneth Petty were married in 2019, the couple and their representatives have intimidated, bribed, and cajoled her to change her testimony in the hopes of getting Petty removed from the sex offenders registry. As he did not update his address and file as a sex offender when the couple moved to California in 2019, he faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release. Last week, The Daily Beast reported that Blackburn filed the request for a default judgment after the deadline to respond to the lawsuit passed.

Now, however, Minaj and Petty’s lawyer, Judd Burstein, has filed a motion to dismiss the new complaint, saying that the delay in responding was “not willful.” Instead, the defendants maintain, it was the result of an innocent mistake after a Zoom conversation on September 22 ended with the impression that Burstein had been retained. However, Nicki says she learned on October 15 that her manager “had not understood” that she approved the lawyer, prompting her to contact him and ensure his services.

“My failure to respond to the complaint was the product of an innocent mistake, and I ask the court to excuse the delay so that I can defend what I believe to be an entirely frivolous case which plaintiff’s counsel has brought against me in an effort to use my name to generate publicity for himself,” the new documents read. The docs also assert that Nicki was never served the initial lawsuit, claiming that the person the process server handed the documents to was never at the residence.