Diplo sued for alleged revenge porn distribution in new lawsuit
Content warning: This article contains references to alleged sexual harassment
Diplo is being sued for allegedly distributing revenge porn.
Vanity Fair reports that a lawsuit against the artist, real name Thomas Wesley Pentz, was filed in a California federal court on Thursday, 27th June. A woman, identified in the claim as Jane Doe, claims that Pentz sent images and videos of the two of them having sex to another woman via Snapchat without Doe’s consent.
Doe claims that the other woman – whom she did not know – approached her in November 2023 to tell her that Pentz had sent her “the intimate material” via Snapchat in October 2018. After that, Doe filed a police report, leading to the New York Police Department filing an arrest warrant for Pentz. In a statement shared with Pitchfork, a spokesperson for the NYPD said that the complaint is “currently being investigated by NYPD detectives”.
Pentz has denied the allegations. In a post shared to Instagram on Sunday, 30th June, he wrote: “Don’t believe what you read in the news. I don’t own a $100 million dollar mansion, I didn’t pay €450,000 to rave in Ibiza and I didn’t send dirty Snapchats in 2017.”
Doe reportedly began communicating with Pentz on Snapchat in April 2016, when she was 21 years old. They exchanged pornographic images for two months and ultimately began having sex, according to the claim. Their relationship continued until October 2023, the month before Doe learned that Pentz had allegedly been sharing images and videos of their sexual contact without her knowledge or consent.
In a statement shared with Pitchfork, one of Jane Doe’s lawyers, Helene M. Weiss said: “Our client deserves justice, and she’s hopeful that this litigation may serve as a catalyst in ending the defendant’s repeated victimization of women once and for all. We cannot allow survivors of image based sexual abuse to be silenced.”
In a statement shared with Vanity Fair, Diplo’s attorney, Bryan J. Freedman, said: “Time and again, Wes has been targeted by a group of untrustworthy individuals and their unscrupulous lawyers, cobbling together falsehoods in search of a meritless payday. This suit seems to be just more of the same, which is why we have no reason to believe that this will end any differently than all the others.”
This is the second time in the past year that Diplo has been accused of distributing revenge porn. A California-based woman told the Los Angeles Police Department last August that he had shared nude photographs of her without her permission. She is also suing him for sexual battery and defamation. Diplo has denied these allegations. A trial is scheduled for January 2025.
Last week, it was reported that police were investigating Diplo following an illegal party at Ibiza’s Cala d’Hort viewpoint.
