Untangling the Sexual-Misconduct Allegations Against Diplo
A second woman has accused the DJ of distributing revenge porn.
On Thursday, a woman identified as Jane Doe filed a lawsuit accusing Diplo of distributing revenge porn, Vanity Fair reports. According to the suit, the DJ — whose legal name is Thomas Wesley Pentz — has been distributing images of their sexual encounters since 2018. It’s not the first time Diplo has faced allegations of sexual misconduct. Back in 2021, Buzzfeed News reported that the Los Angeles city attorney’s office was considering bringing criminal charges against the him for invasion of privacy and intentionally spreading an STI. The charges stemmed from allegations an anonymous woman made that the musician groomed her, sexually assaulted her, intentionally gave her chlamydia, and released sexually explicit videos of her without consent. After news of that story broke, Diplo and his legal team said the woman is a delusional fan attempting to scam him for rejecting her. Amid multiple lawsuits, restraining orders, and Twitter threads, the story has becoming increasingly confusing to follow. Here’s what we know.
A 25-year-old woman says that Diplo raped her.
According to the initial legal filings obtained by Buzzfeed News, the accuser, who isn’t being identified to protect her privacy, says that Diplo reached out to her on Twitter when she was 17, and they continued to talk before they first had consensual sex when she was 21 in March of 2018. Then, according to her account, just over a year later, Diplo raped her in his hotel room after a performance in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas police declined to file charges. There are medical records from days after this encounter that show she tested positive for chlamydia, and she says in her filings that Diplo was her only sexual partner at the time.
In October 2020, the woman filed a report with the LAPD saying that Diplo recorded sexually explicit videos of her without her permission and, years later, distributed at least one of them without her consent. She also accused the DJ of knowingly infecting her with chlamydia. The report alleges that Diplo raped the woman in his Las Vegas hotel room after a concert, which no criminal charges have yet been filed for.
Before she went to the LAPD, the woman posted a series of tweets that included these allegations, in addition to claiming that Diplo had groomed her and then hired a private investigator to track her down after an argument. Days after the thread appeared, an anonymous Twitter account posted a sexually explicit photo of the woman. She says Diplo was the only person in possession of this photo.
Diplo says the accuser has been stalking and harassing him for years.
In November of 2020, the woman was granted a temporary restraining order against Diplo. His lawyer denied the revenge-porn allegations to Rolling Stone, saying that the woman “has been harassing my client and his family for more than a year.” A month later, he filed his own restraining order against her, saying that she posted nude images of him without his consent.
The two have starkly different accounts of their relationship. In October 2021, Diplo posted an Instagram carousel disputing the charges and allegations being brought against him. According to his account, which includes screenshots of messages allegedly sent from his accuser, the woman was an obsessed fan with whom he had two consensual encounters over the course of a few years before realizing she was delusional and attempting to stop all communications with her. He said that he didn’t meet her until 2018, and that she had been using fake numbers and anonymous social media accounts to harass him and the mother of one of his children. He also said a family in Florida has a permanent restraining order against her.
The post referred to a separate sexual-assault case that was dropped ten days after it was filed in July of 2021, which accused Diplo of forcing a woman referred to as E.K. to perform oral sex in his Las Vegas hotel room in July of 2019. According to Diplo, this is the same night that his accuser says he raped her. He says he had consensual sex with the woman and a handful of her friends, including E.K., and that the charges were dropped because he found videos of that night that both women filmed.
Both restraining orders were dismissed in January of 2021, when neither party’s lawyers showed up at a hearing. Then, in April, Diplo filed a lawsuit for monetary damages, outlining his claims that the woman was a crazed fan. The lawsuit was pretty much in line with the substance of his Instagram post, accusing her of stalking, trespassing, and distributing private materials. The woman also filed a lawsuit, suing Diplo for alleged sexual battery, assault, defamation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The suit described Diplo as “a middle-aged white man who targets very young Black women and girls for sexual assault.” In 2022, Diplo was awarded $1.2 million after an arbitrator found that the woman’s social-media posts had violated their mutual restraining order.
Another woman has accused Diplo of distributing revenge porn.
Years after the first woman accused Diplo of sharing revenge porn of their sexual encounters, the DJ is facing another lawsuit for the same thing. According to a report in Vanity Fair, a woman going by Jane Doe has filed a federal suit against Diplo. Doe’s suit claims that she and Diplo began talking to each other on Snapchat in April 2016, when she was 21 years old. According to her suit, they exchanged explicit images for two months before actually having sex. She says the two continued having a sexual relationship until October 2023, one month before Doe says she found out that Diplo was sharing photos and videos of them having sex without her consent.
In her suit, Doe claims that a woman she didn’t know reached out to her in November saying that she had videos and photos of Doe and Diplo having sex. The woman told Doe that she had received the materials from Diplo via Snapchat in 2018. Doe’s suit claims that this was not a one-off incident and that Diplo continued to share the videos and photos for years.
Doe states that she reported Diplo to the New York Police Department on November 7, at which point a warrant was issued for his arrest. Diplo has not yet commented on the latest allegations. In a statement, Jane Doe’s lawyer, Helene Weiss, said, “Diplo’s alleged illicit pattern of behavior illustrates the harm he’s caused Jane Doe, and other young women just like her.”
The Cut has reached out to Diplo’s lawyer and will update this post when we hear back.
This post has been updated.