Garth Brooks wasted no time in making his next move today once the “We Shall Be Free” singer was hit with a rape case from a former makeup artist and stylist, and Trisha Yearwood moved from California state court to federal court.
In a 17-page motion to dismiss filed late Friday in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Brooks and his attorneys at O’Melveny & Myers want the West Coast Jane Roe case closed as soon as possible. They have requested a hearing before Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald in downtown Los Angeles on the morning of Dec. 9 on the matter.
Read Garth Brooks’ motion to dismiss the rape case against him in California and transfer it to Mississippi here
The former employee, identified by name by Brooks in an Oct. 8 document in federal court in Mississippi, alleged in her highly graphic photo and more than $75,000 in unspecified damages she seeks in an Oct. 3 filing in Los Angeles Superior Court that she was the victim of an “extremely painful” and shocking attack by the “Friends in Low Places” singer.
Stating that Brooks took advantage of her through constant groping, lewd remarks and more starting in 2019 because he knew how much she needed to work, Jane Roe’s attorney, Doug Wigdor, exclaimed: “Brooks thinks he’s entitled to sexual gratification when he wants it, and using an employee’s access to it is fair game.”
Rejecting the accusations and claiming that his previous filing in Mississippi was “a blatant attempt to further control and bully a sexual assault victim by using his millionaire resources to manipulate the legal system,” Brooks quickly said he was blackmailed into “writing a multi-million dollar check.”
Returning to the originally anonymous action that Brooks himself preemptively filed in mid-September, the county singer today also seeks to see all proceedings move to Mississippi and Jane Roe to refile her case as counterclaims. Procedurally as the thunder blows, the two-way move by Brooks’ attorney Daniel Petrocelli (who seems to hover around the big names and big issues in the big studio for the past several years), puts Megan K. Smith and Eric Amdursky put their manicured thumbs on the precedent of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
The Long Short Statute: Brooks’ team insists on introducing their client on Sept. 13 at Magnolia State and introducing Jane Roe on Oct. 3 at Golden State to be “Duplicate claim”.
The federal rule “provides that all ‘compulsory counterclaims’ – such as Roe claims, which rely on the same basic set of facts – are raised in the first action, not in a parallel action in another court,” today’s motion states. “Therefore, when a plaintiff makes those claims outside of the first action, the court presiding over the subsequently filed action must either dismiss the claims or hold them in abeyance while the first action is pending,” the motion states.
Brooks’ attorney emphasizes that “Roe itself approves of overlapping cases.”
“In fact, a few days after Brooks’ counsel reached out to Roe’s counsel to meet and confer on this motion to dismiss, Roe filed a motion in the Southern District of Mississippi asking the court there to transfer the Mississippi action to this Court because, according to Roe, the tort claims that Brooks made against Roe are mandatory counterclaims arising from the same operative facts.
Roe’s counsel had no response to Brooks’ tactics in federal court. However, Wigdor partner Jane M. Christensen had this to say about Brooks’ earlier successful attempt to move Jane Roe’s suit from Los Angeles Superior Court to federal jurisdiction: “This is just more of the same bullying and intimidation used by Garth Brooks.” From the moment he learned that our client intended to hold him accountable. We look forward to going before a jury and getting to the bottom of this case.”
Brooks is scheduled to restart Caesars Palace on Dec. 5 and almost certainly won’t be at the DTLA hearing a few days later. However, a few days ago, it seemed fairly clear that the singer had more than just Sin City in mind.
Brooks said in his Inside Studio G Facebook Live broadcast earlier this week: “The truth … is not told in one voice, it’s told by the people who were actually there.”