Chris Brown’s $500 million lawsuit was thrown out by a judge who said the abuse allegations documentary met journalistic standards
A California judge threw out Chris Brown’s high-profile lawsuit against a TV program about claims made against him in the past. This ended the $500 million defamation case before it went to trial.
Brown’s case against Warner Bros. Discovery and Ample Entertainment, which made the 2024 Investigation Discovery special “Chris Brown: A History of Violence,” was thrown out on Monday, January 12. Brown said that the companies knew they were spreading harmful and false information about him.
The main issue in the argument was how the video showed a woman who says Brown raped her in 2020 while she was on a yacht owned by Diddy. Brown has always denied the claim, saying that the woman’s story changed over time, she didn’t give police important text messages, and her personal past made it hard to believe her.
These reasons were not accepted by Judge Colin Leis, who wrote that the documentary did not ignore or hide the problems that Brown’s lawyers pointed out.
“The court has seen the whole documentary in person.” “The documentary lists most of the problems that the plaintiff points out, such as the fact that the text messages exist,” Leis wrote. “Therefore, the media defendants gave a ‘fair and true’ account of what the woman said and what happened in court.”
The judge also talked about Brown’s concerns about the culture writer Scaachi Koul’s comments in the film, in which he said the singer had a “tendency for punching women in the face.” Leis pointed out that Brown has admitted to hitting Rihanna in the past.
The order says that the plaintiff has not shown that Scaachi Koul’s ideas about the plaintiff’s preferences are not true.
The court eventually threw out the case because of California’s anti-SLAPP law, which stops claims that go after speech that is protected by the Constitution. That law says that plaintiffs must show a basic level of legal merit before they can go forward. The judge decided that Brown did not meet that bar.
After the choice was made, people from Brown and Warner Bros. Discovery did not respond to requests for comment. Brown can still file an appeal if he wants to, but for now, the program is still protected by the law.
