kenneth petty

More than three months after Nicki Minaj and her husband Kenneth Petty were sued for harassment byJennifer Hough, who accused the latter of rape, Petty has made a new public statement on the matter. He claims that his interaction with Hough was consensual and insists that he did not rape her. Court documents obtained by XXL say that “Defendant [Petty] denies that he ever raped Plaintiff [Hough] and Defendant denies all of Plaintiff’s allegations of improper conduct and/or sexual assault.” It continues, “Rather, the sexual encounter between Plaintiff and Defendant was consensual and Plaintiff was a willing participant.”

The document continues, “Petty pled guilty to attempted rape, despite his innocence, because he was a scared 16-year-old kid and was told that his sentence would be 20 years to life if he did not plead guilty to attempted rape.” The 1995 conviction led to the New York State Board of Examiners of Sex Offenders’ decision to designate him as a Level 2 offender. However, in late 2019 he was arrested for failing to register as an offender, a charge he pled guilty to in September of this year. He faces a maximum sentence of ten years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release.

Hough’s attorney Tyrone A. Blackburn issued a response to XXL about Petty’s comments. “A willing participant would not run 20 blocks to school after a sexual encounter and tell the school security/police that she was raped,” Blackburn said. “If Petty believed Ms. Hough was a willing participant he should have never plead guilty to attempted rape.”

Petty’s comments come after a judge ruled that Nicki Minaj would not have to pay a $20 million judgment in the harassment case.

Jennifer Hough, who says that Nicki Minaj and her husband Kenneth Petty have been harassing her over his 1995 rape conviction, appeared on The Real to address her current lawsuit against the couple and the residual effects of the original incident, for which she says she previously blamed herself. She says that after the initial incident, for which Petty served four years in New York prison and was eventually registered as a sex offender, she tried to hide from the world, blaming herself for his assault.

However, in recent years, she says her fear changed to one of Nicki Minaj’s power and influence. Hough recounts her conversation with Nicki in 2020 in which the star offered to fly Hough and her family to California in exchange for recanting her 1995 testimony and helping Petty clear his name from the sex offender registry. Petty had recently been arrested for failing to update his address when the couple moved from New York to California after getting married and has since pled guilty for failing to register as a sex offender. Hough, however, declined the offer, saying, “I told her, woman to woman, this really happened.”

She explains how the couple harassed her, sending representatives to her family members to negotiate payments to help them out, and eventually resorting to threats over her reluctance to assist them. “The last message I received was that I should have taken the money because they are gonna use that money to put on my head,” she says. Her intention with the lawsuit is to stand up to the couple and tell them that “you can’t do this to people — you shouldn’t do this to people… you can’t intimidate people to make things go better for you.”

You can watch the interview in the video above.

Complex reports that Kenneth Petty, Nicki Minaj’s husband since 2019, has pled guilty to failing to register as a sex offender. Petty was convicted of first-degree attempted rape in 1995, serving out his four-year sentence and registering as a sex offender in New York. However, when the couple moved from New York to California after making their marriage official, he did not update authorities in his new home state.

He was arrested in November 2019 after a traffic stop when police realized he hadn’t registered and was arrested again in March 2020 for federal charges even after registering that month. He pled “not guilty” at the time, perhaps in hopes that he could get his original conviction overturned, but now faces a maximum sentence of ten years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release. His sentencing has been scheduled for January 24, 2022.

His efforts toward overturning his original conviction included suing the State of New York City’s Criminal Justice Services Department in the hopes of having his name removed from the sex offenders registry, on which state law mandates he must be registered for life. However, his other pursuit, getting his original victim Jennifer Hough to recant her testimony, has only earned him a lawsuit from Hough, claiming that his and Nicki’s representatives have harassed her since 2018, trying to bribe her and even making threats through lawyers and fans.