On Tuesday, Buzzfeed News reported that the Los Angeles city attorney’s office is considering bringing criminal charges against the producer Diplo for invasion of privacy and intentionally spreading an STI. The charges stem from allegations an anonymous woman has made that the musician groomed her, sexually assaulted her, intentionally gave her chlamydia, and released sexually explicit videos of her without consent. Since news of the story broke last year, Diplo and his legal team have said the woman is a delusional fan attempting to scam him for rejecting her. Amid multiple lawsuits, restraining orders, and Twitter threads, the story has becoming increasingly confusing to follow. Here’s what we know.
A 25-year-old woman says that Diplo raped her.
According to legal filings obtained by Buzzfeed News, the accuser, who isn’t being identified to protect her privacy, says that Diplo reached out to her on Twitter when she was seventeen, and they continued to talk before they first had consensual sex when she was 21 in March of 2018. Then, according to her account, just over a year later, Diplo raped her in his hotel room after a performance in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas police declined to file charges. There are medical records from days after this encounter that show she tested positive for chlamydia, and she says in her filings that Diplo was her only sexual partner at the time.
In October 2020, the woman filed a report with the LAPD saying that Diplo recorded sexually explicit videos of her without her permission and, years later, distributed at least one of them without her consent. She also accused the DJ of knowingly infecting her with chlamydia. The report alleges that Diplo raped the woman in his Las Vegas hotel room after a concert, which no criminal charges have yet been filed for.
Before she went to the LAPD, the woman posted a series of tweets that included these allegations, in addition to claiming that Diplo had groomed her and then hired a private investigator to track her down after an argument. Days after the thread appeared, an anonymous Twitter account posted a sexually explicit photo of the woman. She says Diplo was the only person in possession of this photo.
Diplo says his accuser has been stalking and harassing him for years.
In November of 2020, the woman was granted a temporary restraining order against Diplo. His lawyer denied the revenge-porn allegations to Rolling Stone, saying that the woman “has been harassing my client and his family for more than a year.” A month later, he filed his own restraining order against her, saying that she posted nude images of him without his consent.
The two have starkly different accounts of their relationship. On Wednesday, Diplo posted an Instagram carousel disputing all the charges and allegations being brought against him. According to his account, which includes screenshots of messages allegedly sent from his accuser, the woman is an obsessed fan with whom he had two consensual encounters over the course of a few years before realizing she was delusional and attempting to stop all communications with her. He says that he didn’t meet her until 2018, and that she has been using fake numbers and anonymous social media accounts to harass him and the mother of one of his children. He also says a family in Florida has a permanent restraining order against her.
The post refers to a separate sexual-assault case that was dropped ten days after it was filed in July of this year, which accused Diplo of forcing a woman referred to as E.K. to perform oral sex in his Las Vegas hotel room in July of 2019. According to Diplo, this is the same night that his accuser says he raped her. He says he had consensual sex with the woman and a handful of her friends, including E.K., and that the charges were dropped because he found videos of that night that both women filmed.
Now Diplo and the woman are suing each other.
Both restraining orders were dismissed in January of this year, when neither party’s lawyers showed up at a hearing. Then, in April, Diplo filed a lawsuit for monetary damages, outlining his claims that the woman was a crazed fan. The lawsuit is pretty much in line with the substance of his Instagram post, accusing her of stalking, trespassing, and distributing private materials.
The woman also filed a lawsuit in June, suing Diplo for alleged sexual battery, assault, defamation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The suit describes Diplo as “a middle-aged white man who targets very young Black women and girls for sexual assault.”
