Rapper, Nicki Minaj and her husband, Kenneth Petty, are being sued by a woman he was convicted of attempting to rape in 1995, it has emerged.
Minaj’s now-husband, Kenneth ‘Zoo’ Petty, was accused of sexually assaulting the woman in South Jamaica neighborhood in Queens, when they were both 16 years old in 1994.
Petty was convicted of attempted rape a year later and he served four-and-a-half years in prison after pleading guilty.
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The conviction forces Petty to register as a sex offender, but he failed to do so in the state of California when he moved there with Minaj, and he was arrested in March 2020.
Victim Jennifer Hough, now 43, claims the couple began harassing her immediately after Petty was arrested, and tried to get her to recant her testimony.
In the lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, the woman alleges that Minaj offered her $500,000 (£360,000) via an intermediary in return for recanting her accusations against Petty.
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The lawsuit claims that, shortly after Petty’s arrest in 2020, the intermediary gave the rapper the woman’s number. Minaj is alleged to have called her and offered to fly her and her family to Los Angeles if she could “help” her. The offer was declined, the lawsuit says.
The woman also claims that she turned down Minaj’s offer to have her publicist draft a statement recanting the allegation.
According to the lawsuit, the woman is said to have told Minaj: “I need you to know woman to woman, that this happened.”
The woman further claims that within days of rejecting the offers, she and her family “suffered an onslaught of harassing calls and unsolicited visits“.
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She also she had not been able to work since May 2020 “due to severe depression, paranoia, constant moving, harassment and threats” from the celebrity couple and their associates.
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, says she is living in hiding as she fears retaliation, alleging that couple carried out harassment, witness intimidation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Hough also sues Petty specifically for sexual assault, over the 1994 attack, according to TMZ.
The lawsuit came just days after Petty accepted a plea deal on the count of failure to register as a sex offender in California.
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Hough has previously only been named as ‘Jennifer‘ in interviews, but is named in the lawsuit and gave an interview on Friday using her full name to The New York Times.
In January, she posted a video online showing her face for the first time, in which she tearfully pleaded with Minaj: ‘Tell your f**king people to leave my family alone… Leave me and my family the f**k alone.’
Many of the alarming allegations in the lawsuit are the same as ones Jennifer made in an interview with the Daily Beast in March.
The musician’s legal team has not yet responded to the accusations, according to US media.
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Minaj and Petty began dating in 2018 and announced a year later that they were married. The couple have an 11-month-old son.
