Carmen Bryan Sues N.O.R.E. Over A 1999 Manhattan Nightclub Assault

Carmen Bryan filed a civil lawsuit against N.O.R.E. on Wednesday accusing the rapper and podcaster of sexually assaulting her inside a packed Manhattan nightclub in May 1999.

The 20 page complaint, filed in New York and first obtained by Rolling Stone, names Victor Santiago, who has performed as N.O.R.E. and Noreaga since the mid nineties and now hosts Drink Champs. Carmen Bryan is an entrepreneur and author who worked at Rush Management during that era and shares a daughter with Nas.

According to the complaint, Santiago was at the club promoting his second album, Melvin Flynt Da Hustler, and approached Bryan while visibly intoxicated. She had not invited the contact and had not consented to any sexual contact. The suit alleges he grabbed intimate areas of her body and committed an act of nonconsensual digital penetration, meaning penetration with the fingers. It says he physically overpowered her, that she told him to stop and he did not, and that other people in the club had to pull him off of her. This happened with music playing and patrons standing close enough to see it.

What the complaint describes next is the part driving the coverage. Carmen Bryan says she left the club crying and he followed her outside, continuing to make crude remarks and repeatedly asking her whether she knew who he was. Then, under the streetlights, he recognized her as the mother of Nas’ child and immediately apologized. The complaint quotes him telling her he did not know it was her, and blaming it on her doing something different with her hair. Weeks later, at a combined Father’s Day event and birthday party for her daughter, he approached her again to apologize.

Her attorney, Marjorie Mesidor, went straight at that apology in a statement. She said no woman signs up to be assaulted, and that treating an assault as excusable or as something that did not happen because the man failed to recognize his victim strips women of their humanity. Her point is that the apology is not evidence of remorse for the act. It is evidence that the identity of the woman was what mattered, and that Bryan became a person worth apologizing to only after he placed her.

The suit says Carmen Bryan stayed silent for more than 25 years, and it puts the reason in the culture of hip hop in the nineties, describing pervasive sexism, sexual objectification, and misogynoir, a term for the specific mix of racism and sexism directed at Black women. Anyone who was around that industry in that decade understands what happened to women who accused a rising artist of anything. The complaint is arguing that the silence was manufactured by the environment rather than chosen.

Bryan says she contacted Santiago in March of this year to tell him a lawsuit was coming, hoping to resolve it privately. According to the complaint, he responded that he did not know who she was. 

The claims are assault, battery, nonconsensual sexual contact, offensive touching, and gender motivated violence under New York law. That last one refers to the state’s Gender Motivated Violence Act, a civil law that lets survivors sue over crimes committed because of their gender, and which New York City reopened for a window allowing older claims to be filed. It is why an allegation from 1999 can be brought now. Bryan is seeking compensatory damages along with damages for emotional distress and mental anguish.

Everything here is an allegation contained in a civil complaint. Nothing has been tested in court and nothing has been proven. N.O.R.E. has not publicly responded and had not issued a statement as of Wednesday evening.