A hair and makeup artist has accused the country singer Garth Brooks of sexual assault and battery in a civil lawsuit filed in Los Angeles, CNN reported.
The anonymous accuser, referred to in the complaint as “Jane Roe”, alleges that Brooks raped her during a work trip to Los Angeles in 2019, and that he repeatedly groped her and made sexually explicit comments while she was doing his hair or makeup throughout 2019.
Representatives for Brooks did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegations.
Roe is represented in the case by Douglas Wigdor, an attorney known as a “leading #MeToo lawyer” who previously represented women who accused Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly and Joe Biden of sexual misconduct.
Wigdor and the plantiff’s other lawyers allege that Brooks took advantage of the makeup artist while she was experiencing financial hardship, first offering her more frequent paid work, and then engaging in a pattern of sexual harassment and sexual assault, which they describe in the lawsuit in graphic detail.
“The complaint filed today demonstrates that sexual predators exist not only in corporate America, Hollywood and in the rap and rock and roll industries but also in the world of country music,” Wigdor and two other attorneys for the plantiff, Jeanne Christensen and Hayley Baker, said in a statement to the Guardian.
According to the complaint, the woman accusing Brooks of sexual assault is a stylist who has worked in the music industry for more than 30 years, including doing hair and makeup for celebrities appearing in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and other publications. She was first hired in 1999 to do hair and makeup for Trisha Yearwood, another country music star and Brooks’s wife, and began to do the same for Brooks in 2017.
In the complaint, the woman alleges that Brooks forcefully raped her in a Los Angeles hotel room in May 2019, when she accompanied him from Nashville to California for a tribute performance honoring R&B legend Sam Moore. Afterwards, she did his makeup so he could get to the event on time, the complaint alleges.
After that assault, she had to visit her OB-GYN because of her injuries, and the assault also left her with severe back and neck pain and emotional trauma, according to the complaint.
Over the following months, the woman alleges, Brooks continued to sexually harass her and assault her, including subjecting her to sexually explicit comments, and repeatedly groping her breasts, including while she was styling him for public appearances.
Brooks did this with such frequency “that it was inevitable that other employees of Brooks’s likely saw or heard instances of the unwanted physical groping of her breasts while she was styling his hair and doing his make-up”, the complaint alleges.
In 2020, during a styling session, Brooks “surreptitiously took her phone and deleted most of the text messages that he had sent to her containing explicit sexual content”, the complaint alleges.
Attorneys for “Jane Roe” said that Brooks filed a federal lawsuit against her in Mississippi last month, in an attempt to block her from publicizing her allegations against him.
CNN previously reported on a “highly unusual legal battle” in Mississippi, in which an anonymous celebrity plaintiff asked a federal court “to declare a sexual assault accuser’s allegations untrue and stop her from further publicizing them”. The plaintiff in that case alleged that the accuser was “attempting to extort and defame him with ‘false allegations’ that would ‘irreparably harm’ his reputation and career”, CNN reported.
In her complaint, the woman’s lawyers describe Brooks’s anonymous Mississippi lawsuit as an attempt to bully his accuser, and say he claimed she was threatening to file a complaint against him in California “only because Brooks refused to give her a raise and pay for health insurance”.
