In May, Chris Brown was hit with an alarming civil lawsuit filed by celebrity women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred. Allred’s client, known as Jane Doe, claimed she was coerced into attending a 2017 sex party co-hosted by Brown and rapper Young Lo (Lowell Grissom, Jr.) at Brown’s California home, where Doe alleges she was supplied with illicit drugs, barricaded in a bedroom, and forced to perform oral sex on Grissom and an unnamed woman. Doe further alleges that Grissom raped her twice in different rooms before she was allowed to leave. The suit accuses Brown in particular of co-conspiring, aiding and abetting in sexual assault, as well as negligence of premises liability (the legal concept that a property owner may bear responsibility if someone is hurt on the premises).
Grissom has previously denied what his attorney called “false and defaming accusations.” Brown has yet to comment on the situation publicly, but he is firing back in court, the Blast reports today. In new filings, Brown’s team reportedly point out that Doe’s complaint doesn’t allege that the singer personally touched, harmed, or threatened her. Brown also reportedly seeks to defend himself by claiming he couldn’t have been involved because he was busy: specifically, that he was “occupied with pornography and performing sexual acts with women” in another room at the time of the alleged assaults.
In her original suit, Doe claimed she and other women were brought to a room with four beds, where Brown told Grissom to barricade the door and turn on music and pornography allegedly intended to “cover up the sounds of any resistance” as they began to engage in sexual activity with some of the women. She also claimed that Brown and Grissom had withheld her phone in order to lure her to the house, and that once there, she saw both men in possession of multiple guns. The case is reportedly still under investigation.
In an unrelated incident, Brown was arrested in Florida last month for allegedly punching a nightclub photographer in 2017. He entered a plea of not guilty in that case.
