Jimmie Allen has been judged liable for sexually assaulting and secretly filming a woman in a Las Vegas hotel room in 2022, accusations the once-rising country star denied but forfeited his right to defend by flouting multiple court-imposed deadlines and orders in the lawsuit.

A Monday (Aug. 18) ruling in Tennessee federal court holds Allen liable by default for battery, assault, invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress. The civil claims had been scheduled to go to trial this summer, but a pattern of disobedience by Allen and his lawyers earned them a premature judgment instead.

“The defendants throughout have failed to comply with case management discovery deadlines and even failed to comply with specific orders of this court,” wrote Judge Aleta A. Trauger. “For these reasons, the plaintiff’s motion for sanctions and judgment against defendants Jimmie Allen and Aadyn’s Dad Touring Inc. is granted.”

Aadyn’s Dad Touring is the company that employed Allen’s bodyguard, Charles Hurd, who allegedly helped the singer pursue the anonymous woman at the center of the case. Judge Trauger says the plaintiff’s lawyers can now put in a request for financial damages from both Allen and the touring company.

The case is one of two civil sexual assault lawsuits brought against Allen in 2023, derailing the singer’s promising career after a run of No. 1 hits on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart. He was subsequently dropped by his label, BBR Music Group, as well as his booking agency, publicist and management company.

The first lawsuit accused Allen of sexually harassing and abusing his day-to-day manager over a period of 18 months from 2020 and 2022. Allen denied the claims and countersued his ex-manager for defamation; that case was settled in 2024.

The second lawsuit brought against Allen is the one at issue in Monday’s ruling. That case, filed by a woman going by the pseudonym Jane Doe 2, says she met Allen on a flight to Nashville in May 2022 and began to regularly text and FaceTime with the singer.

Doe claims she met up with Allen in Las Vegas the following July. While the two had consensual sex, the woman says Allen ejaculated inside her without a condom despite her explicit and repeated protests against this.

After Allen allegedly “passed out” following sex, Doe says she discovered that he had surreptitiously set up his cellphone to record the entire encounter without her knowledge.

Allen denied assaulting Doe and said she consented to the video recording, countersuing her as well. But things didn’t go so smoothly for Allen as the litigation progressed, with the singer cycling through various lawyers and blowing past deadlines for producing evidence and sitting for a deposition.

In December, Judge Trauger axed Allen’s counterclaim as a penalty for his failure to produce the cellphone used to record the sexual encounter. And in March, he was ordered to pay nearly $6,000 to Doe’s lawyers for canceling a mediation session at the last minute.

The final straw came earlier this summer when, with the case’s June trial date fast approaching, Allen still hadn’t paid that $6,000 sum or hired a new local Tennessee lawyer to replace yet another attorney who was leaving his team. Doe’s counsel moved for default judgment in May, saying Allen had already been given his fair share of warnings.

“There are no alternative sanctions to judgment that this court has not already attempted — e.g., extensions, discovery orders, the payment of costs, and the replacement of counsel,” wrote Doe’s attorney Elizabeth Fegan. “There is no reason to believe that entering similar orders would magically now result in defendants’ compliance.”

Allen’s lawyers did not respond to the default judgment request, leading Judge Trauger to cancel the trial date and grant Doe’s motion on Monday. In a comment to Billboard, Fegan says, “We are pleased that the court entered judgment in her favor and look forward to proving her damages.”

“Jimmie Allen’s abuse has had a profound impact on Jane Doe 2,” adds Fegan. “The court’s ruling makes clear that Allen cannot simply ignore the serious consequences of his actions.”

Allen’s reps did not return requests for comment.

The news comes as Allen has been attempting to mount a country comeback. On Aug. 6, he released his first new song, “Beer 99,” to the country format since 2023 and quickly followed up on Tuesday (Aug. 12) with “Country Boys Never Learn.”

Allen has also announced a 14-city tour that kicks off Sept. 5 in Dallas and concludes Nov. 29 in Rochester, N.H. 

Young Thug has won a court ruling ordering prosecutors to return property seized by law enforcement during his Atlanta gang trial — including nearly $150,000 in cash, several cars and numerous pieces of jewelry.

At a court hearing Monday (Aug. 18), Fulton County Judge Paige Reese Whitaker granted a motion by Thug’s lawyers and dismissed a civil forfeiture lawsuit tied to his long-running criminal case, which ended last year with his release from jail.

The judge’s decision — she said prosecutors missed key deadlines to litigate the case — means Thug is owed the return of numerous items seized by authorities when he was arrested, including roughly $145,000 in cash, a Chevrolet Corvette and a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and many pieces of jewelry.

“I think that the court has no option under the case law and under the statute but to grant this dismissal, so the dismissal is granted,” the judge said.

In court filings, prosecutors pinned the blame for delays on Thug’s own lawyers — saying it was attorney Brian Steel who had requested a change to the trial date while he separately represented Sean “Diddy” Combs in his blockbuster criminal trial in New York City.

But the judge was unmoved: “The procedural rules and requirements of these forfeiture statutes are mandatory and the statutes are strictly construed against the state,” the judge said. She noted that prosecutors can appeal the ruling and said any return of property would likely be postponed by such an appeal.

The items seized from Young Thug at issue in the lawsuit previously also included many other goods, including Mercedes-Benz vehicles, a Lamborghini Aventador and multiple Glock handguns, but those items have already been returned, according to Thug’s legal team.

The Fulton County District Attorney’s office did not immediately return a request for comment. But in a statement to Fox’s Atlanta affiliate, Deputy District Attorney Jeff DiSantis criticized the judge’s decision to toss the case out.

“We are perplexed that Judge Whitaker dismissed the case based on a timeline requested by defense counsel and a date the court set for trial,” DiSantis said. “We are evaluating the case now for possible appeal considering that strange procedural history.”

Thug and dozens of others were indicted by Atlanta prosecutors in May 2022 over accusations that his “YSL” — nominally a record label — was also a violent street gang called “Young Slime Life” that had wrought “havoc” on the city for years.

Pitting authorities in America’s rap capital against a chart-topping rapper who helped shape the sound of hip-hop in the 2010s, the YSL case captivated the music business for years. Most notably, it relied heavily on song lyrics as evidence, a controversial practice that has drawn backlash from the music industry and efforts by lawmakers to stop it.

More than two years after the case was filed — and after more than a year of a slow, chaotic trial — the case against Thug ended with a stunning conclusion. After talk of a mistrial, Thug opted to plead guilty and beg for leniency — a move that paid off when Judge Whitaker sentenced him to only probation.

The case that was dismissed on Monday was a so-called civil forfeiture action, which allows the government to file lawsuits seeking to confiscate property they allege is tied to criminal conduct.

Thug’s lawyers moved to dismiss the case last month, arguing there was a strict 60-day time limit for bringing such cases to trial that the government had failed to honor after the case was unpaused in April. They cited the fact that forfeiture of private property is “disfavored” under the law and must be tightly restricted.

Attorneys for Tory Lanez (Daystar Peterson) urged an appeals court to overturn his convictions for shooting Megan Thee Stallion, arguing that his trial was “riddled with errors” and that prosecutors misled the jury about DNA evidence.

At a crucial hearing Monday (Aug. 18) in Lanez’s appellate case, attorney Laura L. Cepero told a panel of five judges that the singer’s legal team has an “unwavering belief” that he is innocent in the 2020 shooting and that he did not receive a fair trial when he was convicted in 2022.

Among other issues raised, Cepero told the appeals court that prosecutors had misconstrued DNA evidence during closing statements to the jury — and that tests showed that there was only a “one in a million” chance that Lanez’s DNA was on the gun used in the shooting.

“It is actually marginally more likely that another member of the African American population touched this gun over Mr. Peterson,” she told the appeals court. “If our jury had heard that Mr. Peterson maybe one in a million touched the gun, I believe that would have been enough to tip that scale and show reasonable doubt.”

Representing prosecutors, Deputy Attorney General Michael C. Keller argued back that the evidence against Lanez had clearly been strong enough to convict him, including three instances in which the star appeared to have “tacitly admitted” that he pulled the trigger: “He was clearly accepting responsibility for something very big,” Keller told the court.

Following a high-profile trial, a jury found Lanez guilty in December 2022 on three felony counts for shooting Megan during a drunken roadside argument in the Hollywood Hills in July 2020. According to prosecutors, when Megan got out of a vehicle and began walking away, Lanez shouted “Dance, b—h!” and fired a gun at her feet, striking her once. In August 2023, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Lanez and his supporters have long maintained his innocence; his legal team has filed multiple forms of appeal to challenge the verdict, and have claimed publicly that new evidence exonerates him (Megan’s reps and prosecutors strongly deny that). In their direct appeal — the case argued Monday — they’ve called the verdict “a miscarriage of justice.”

At the hearing, in addition to the arguments about DNA, Cepero said that Lanez’s lawyers had not been allowed to properly cross-examine Harris after jurors heard a tape in which she pinned the blame on Lanez, violating his constitutional right to “confront” a key witness. She also claimed that prosecutors misled jurors by claiming in opening statements that Justin Edison, a former bodyguard to Megan, was going to testify against Lanez — something that never actually took place.

But Keller, representing the government, urged the court to uphold the verdict against Lanez. In a relatively brief rebuttal, he said that many of the arguments from the singer’s lawyers had been waived because they had not been raised at the trial — and that others were simply “nonsensical.”

“The evidence in this case was compelling,” Kelly told the judges.

Following Monday’s hearing, the appeals court will issue its ruling on the case at some point in the coming weeks or months. When it does, Tory faces long odds: In 2022, California appeals courts overturned a defendant’s guilty verdict in just 19% of cases.

The hearing came more than five years after the July 12, 2020, shooting, which happened as a driver was shuttling Lanez, Megan and her assistant/friend Kelsey Harris from a party at Kylie Jenner’s house. Following the incident, Megan initially told police officers that she had cut her foot stepping on broken glass, but days later alleged that she had been shot. Lanez was eventually charged with the shooting in October 2022.

During a blockbuster trial in Los Angeles court, Lanez’s lawyers tried to sow doubt over who had really pulled the trigger, painting a scenario in which Harris could have been the shooter. But a key defense witness offered confusing eyewitness testimony, and prosecutors pointed to an earlier interview in which Harris pinned the blame squarely on Lanez. Megan herself offered powerful testimony that Lanez had been the one to shoot her, and neither Lanez nor the driver took the witness stand.

Lanez has already lost some of his appeal efforts. In a pair of rulings last week, the same appellate court denied so-called habeas corpus petitions seeking to overturn the convictions. Those filings claimed that key pieces of evidence, including the gun, had gone “missing,” but the appeals court rejected those claims.

If the verdict is eventually upheld, Lanez can appeal the ruling to the California Supreme Court, though that case would face long odds to even be heard by the high court in the first place.