Diddy’s former bodyguard, Joseph Sherman, filed a defamation lawsuit against one of his accusers.
Sherman was sued along with Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs by Thalia Graves, who alleges that the bodyguard and the embattled Bad Boy Records founder allegedly raped her in 2001. Graves filed the suit in New York in September, in which she claimed that she was dating someone back then who was an employee of Bad Boy Records. In her suit, she claimed that the rap mogul called her to a meeting under the guise of discussing issues with her partner’s work performance.
Graves alleges that Diddy gave her a glass of wine while riding with him in an SUV, which ended up being drugged. She claimed that she passed out after arriving at the studio with Combs and later woke up naked with her hands bound “behind her back with what felt like a plastic grocery bag.” The lawsuit then detailed her alleged rape by Diddy and Joseph Sherman, his then-bodyguard who was named in the suit.
Sherman has now countersued Thalia Graves and her attorneys for defamation. He shared a video last Thursday (November 7) on Instagram shortly after filing the suit. He claimed that the alleged victim made “outrageous, disgusting, and life altering statements and publishings…without any regard for the truth” against him in her lawsuit. Sherman says he has never met the woman accusing him of rape, and furthermore, he stopped working at Bad Boy Records and for Diddy in 1999, a full two years before the incident alleged in Graves’ lawsuit. He stated that he was not even allowed to enter the Bad Boy Records offices because by then he had gone on to work for competitor Def Jam.
“Plainly said, the Plaintiff, Joseph Sherman, was not even allowed into Bad Boy records studios or near Sean Combs after 1999. Consequently, he could not have videotaped or raped Thalia Graves,” the suit reads, according to HipHopDX.
Additionally, Sherman shared alleged Instagram DMs from Graves asking him to cooperate with her lawsuit against Diddy. “If you are willing to give me a statement about my rape against Puffy then the attorneys won’t go after you for revenge porn or distribution of a sexual act without consent,” she allegedly said. Graves also claimed that her former boyfriend told her that Diddy and his former bodyguard had shown him a video of the alleged assault. He claims that the two men had a habit of selling these videos.
In his post on Instagram, Sherman wrote, “Let the war began I want a 100 million.”
In the meantime, Diddy is facing a growing number of lawsuits on top of his federal racketeering and sex trafficking case in New York. He is set to stand trial in May 2025.
