The Cassie lawsuit filed by former male escort Clayton Howard is over for the singer after a federal judge dismissed every claim against her in his $35 million case.
Judge Anne Hwang granted Cassie Ventura’s request on October 21 and dismissed the claims with prejudice, which means Howard can never refile them against her. Sean “Diddy” Combs remains a defendant and denies wrongdoing. The judge gave Howard 14 days to revise some of his claims against Bad Boy Entertainment and CeOpco, two companies tied to Diddy that were also named in the suit.
Howard, who worked as an escort under the name “Dave,” filed the lawsuit in summer 2025, just days after a jury acquitted Diddy of sex trafficking and racketeering in his federal criminal trial. He is representing himself without a lawyer. He claimed Diddy and Cassie hired him for multiple sexual encounters in New York, Miami and Los Angeles, the sessions that came to be known as “freak offs” during the trial. He alleged the meetings involved drugs, coercion and abuse that left him with lasting harm, and he claimed Cassie became pregnant with his child and had an abortion. None of those allegations have been proven in court.
Cassie’s attorneys argued the complaint never showed she trafficked him. A sex trafficking claim requires showing that someone was made to perform sex acts through force, threats or deception, and her team said Howard failed to connect anything Cassie did to that standard. They pointed to his own account of repeated cash payments and return visits. They also argued that Howard’s complaint described Diddy’s violence and control over Cassie, including his power to decide when the encounters ended. That lines up with Cassie’s testimony at Diddy’s criminal trial, where she told jurors he pressured her into the sessions and was violent with her.
The Cassie lawsuit ruling follows months of back and forth. Howard rewrote his complaint five times, filing the fifth version on August 3, 2025, after a July 2025 ruling gave him another chance. Ahead of the October 21 hearing, he tried to swap in a new 73 page draft of a sixth version, and Judge Hwang rejected that request. He also moved to drop his claims that he was held for roughly 12 hours during a December 2016 encounter in Miami and that Diddy’s security team took his belongings, saying he now believes those statements were inaccurate.
The fight also played out online. Cassie’s lawyers asked the judge for a protective order after Howard posted an insult filled TikTok aimed at her. On October 19, Diddy’s team asked Judge Hwang to bar Howard from filing more emergency requests, saying they were driving up his legal bills.
Cassie first sued Diddy in November 2023, accusing him of rape, sex trafficking and physical abuse. They settled one day later, and her lawsuit opened the door to the federal investigation that led to his arrest in September 2024. Jurors ultimately convicted him on two counts of transporting people to engage in prostitution, and he was sentenced to 50 months in prison.
