The male prisoner suing Diddy over an alleged 1997 sexual assault revealed he plans to call the entertainer’s ex-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez as a witness in the case, In Touch can exclusively report.
Derrick Lee Cardello-Smith, who sued Diddy, 55, over accusations the mogul assaulted him at a Holiday Inn in Detroit, name dropped Jennifer, 55, in recent court documents obtained by In Touch.
Derrick, who is currently incarcerated at the Michigan Department of Corrections, said he plans to call “Jennifer Lynn Lopez aka Jenny from the Block” to testify about the facts of the case.
He believes she has information about his assault due to her dating Diddy from 1999 to 2001. As In Touch previously reported, Derrick claimed he met Diddy while working as a bartender.
He said the entertainer invited him to a sex party at a hotel. Derrick said he decided to attend.
He said at the party Diddy gave him a drink and told him that he had added “a little something” to it. In the suit, Derrick said the next thing he remembers was waking up to Diddy having sex with another woman.
He said Diddy looked at him and told him, “I did this to you too!” Derrick accused government officials of conspiring with Diddy to cover up the alleged crimes. Derrick demanded $400 million in damages.
Diddy denied the allegations.
His legal team called the claims “baseless.” Diddy’s lawyer claimed Derrick had filed two different complaints and both listed different locations for the alleged assault.
In addition, Diddy said the claims were filed years past the statute of limitations. “Because the assault allegedly occurred in June 1997, any claim [Derrick] might have had expired in June 2000—more than two decades before [Derrick] commenced this litigation,” Diddy’s lawyer argued.
In a recent motion, Diddy’s lawyer wrote, “On June 10, 2024, [Derrick] filed a 15-paragraph complaint alleging that he was assaulted by [Diddy] on June 14, 1997 — nearly twenty-seven years before filing the complaint.”
The mogul’s lawyer continued, “Since [Derrick] first filed, his claims, (which were facially implausible to begin with), have ballooned into a massive conspiracy against him, involving multiple high-ranking Wayne County officials. Now realizing that his untimely claims are subject to dismissal, [Derrick] presents the court with a fresh helping of conspiratorial nonsense. If [Derrick] had spent the last two decades living in fear that he or his family members would be killed if he filed the claim at issue, he would have included such allegations in his complaint. But [Derrick] did not do so, presumably because he had not yet seen the need to invent those facts.”
Derrick argued that he waited because he feared retaliation from Diddy, but Diddy’s team scoffed at the suggested.
Diddy’s lawyer wrote, “[Derrick’s] argument that he was intimidated into waiting over two decades to file this claim is not plausible. [Derrick’s] claim that he feared deadly retaliation from [Diddy], which was reasonable because ‘[Diddy] had Tupac Shakur Killed[,]’ is simply incredible. Even accepted at face value, [Derrick’s] story makes little sense.”
As In Touch previously reported, Diddy was arrested on September 16 on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering. He pleaded not guilty to all charges. The mogul’s attempts to be released on bond have been unsuccessful.
