Russell Simmons is responding in court to a lawsuit that accuses him of rape. In January 2018, a woman named Jennifer, an aspiring filmmaker, filed a $5 million lawsuit claiming Simmons raped her in Los Angeles in 2016, years after another alleged assault in New York. Simmons denied the allegations when the suit was filed, and he has denied the wave of sexual misconduct accusations made against him.
Now, about three months later, Simmons has filed new court documents. According to those filings, Simmons says he and Jennifer were friendly for more than ten years and that any sexual contact between them was always consensual. He also claims that she kept sending him friendly and affectionate messages in the weeks after the alleged 2016 incident.
Simmons’s attorney argues the lawsuit is about money, saying Jennifer came forward “after hearing that women were able to recover money” over abuse allegations. These are Simmons’s claims in a legal response, and they have not been decided by a court. A response from Jennifer to the new filing had not been reported at the time of this post.
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