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Garth Brooks wasted no time making his next move today once the ‘We Shall Be Free’ singer had the rape case from a former make-up artist and stylist to himself and Trisha Yearwood shifted over from California state court to federal court.
In a 17-page motion to dismiss filed late Friday in U.S. District Court Central District of California, Brooks and his O’Melveny & Myers lawyers now want Jane Roe’s West Coast case shuttered ASAP. They’ve requested a hearing in front of Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald in downtown LA for the morning of December 9 on the matter.
Identified by name by Brooks in an October 8 document in federal court in Mississippi, the ex-employee alleged in her extremely graphic and more than $75,000 in unspecified damages seeking October 3 filing in LA Superior Court that she was the victim of an overwhelmingly “painful and traumatic” attack by the “Friends in Low Places” singer.
Stating that Brooks took advantage of her with constant groping, lewd remarks and more starting in 2019 because he knew how much she needed work, Jane Roe’s lawyer Doug Wigdor exclaimed that “Brooks believes he is entitled to sexual gratification when he wants it, and using a female employee to get it, is fair game.”
Rejecting the accusations and the claim that his previous filing in Mississippi was “a blatant attempt to further control and bully his sexual assault victim by utilizing his multi-millionaire resources to game the legal system,” Brooks quickly said the matter was shakedown to make him “write a check for many millions of dollars.”
Harking back to the originally anonymous action that Brooks himself preemptively filed in mid-September, the county singer today is also seeking to see all proceedings moved to Mississippi and for Jane Roe to refile her case as counterclaims. Procedural as the thunder rolls, the one-two move by Brook’s attorneys Daniel Petrocelli (who seems to be hovering up big names and big studio’s big cases the last several years), Megan K. Smith and Eric Amdursky puts its manicured thumb on the precedent of Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
Long statute short: Brooks’ team insist their client’s September 13 filing in the Magnolia State and Jane Roe’s October 3 filing in the Golden State are “duplicative litigation.”
The Federal Rule “mandates that all ‘compulsory counterclaims’—claims, like Roe’s, that turn on the same basic set of facts—be litigated in the first-filed action, not in a parallel suit in another court,” today’s motion states. “So, where a plaintiff brings those claims outside of the first-filed action, the court presiding over the later-filed action must either dismiss the claims or stay them while the first suit proceeds,’ it goes on to say.
“Roe herself agrees that the cases overlap,” Brooks’ lawyer assert in
“Indeed, a few days after Brooks’ counsel reached out to Roe’s counsel to meet and confer about this Motion to Dismiss, Roe filed a motion in the Southern District of Mississippi that asked the court there to transfer the Mississippi Action to this Court because, according to Roe, Brooks’ tort claims against Roe are compulsory counterclaims that arise from the same operative facts,” they say.
Roe’s lawyers had no response to Brooks’ tactics in federal court. However, Wigdor Partner Jeanne M. Christensen did have this to say of Brooks’ ultimately successful attempt of earlier to get Jane Roe’s suit moved from LA Superior Court to federal jurisdiction: “This is just more of the same bullying and intimidation Garth Brooks has used from the moment he learned our client intended to hold him accountable. We look forward to getting before a jury and reaching the merits of this case.”
Brooks is set to restart his Caesars Palace on December 5 and will almost certainly not be at the DTLA hearing a few days later. However, a few days ago, it seemed fairly clear the singer was thinking about more than Sin City.
“Truth …it’s not told by one voice, it’s told by the people that were actually there,” said Brooks on his Facebook livestreamed Inside Studio G broadcast earlier this week.
