Kirk Burrowes was staying in a Midtown Manhattan welfare hotel in 2013 when he says Diddy found him on the street, bear-hugged him, and grabbed his rear end while one of Diddy’s associates stood nearby and threatened his life.
Diddy’s lawyers just went to federal court to argue that it wasn’t a crime. The mogul’s attorneys say that the encounter doesn’t meet the legal definition of a crime of violence under New York City’s Gender-Motivated Violence Act, calling it “a single, chance meeting on a New York City street in broad daylight.”
Diddy’s team says it has nothing to do with gender, meaning his lawyers are using Burrowes’ own words to gut his case.
“Although the Complaint alleges that Mr. Combs touched Plaintiff’s rear, it does not allege that the conduct was undertaken for the purpose of sexual gratification. According to [Burrowes], it was about something different: the Complaint states that the alleged touching was intended ‘to reinforce [Mr. Combs’s] continued dominance and control over [Burrowes’] ability to exist within the music industry and public sphere.’ That has nothing to do with abusing or degrading [Burrowes], and it does not implicate the sexual-purpose element of the statute,” Diddy’s lawyer Jonathan Davis explained.
Burrowes’ 2025 lawsuit against Diddy lays out a decade of alleged sexual abuse starting when the two co-founded Bad Boy Entertainment in 1993, with Diddy repeatedly groping him at the office and summoning him via intercom under false pretenses to walk in on Diddy performing sex acts with employees and interns.
During a 1995 business trip, Burrowes says Diddy greeted him at his hotel suite naked and demanded he watch him masturbate.
Later that same year, Burrowes claims Diddy pinned him down in a Midtown apartment, took his keys so he couldn’t leave, simulated intercourse until he ejaculated, and also allegedly pressured him to perform oral sex and use objects on him anally.
Then separately in 1996, Diddy allegedly walked into Burrowes’ office with a baseball bat while his attorney arrived with a briefcase full of stock certificates, demanding Burrowes sign over his 25% ownership stake in Bad Boy or face violent consequences.
He signed it all away and got nothing, was fired in 1997, and Diddy allegedly blacklisted him across the industry for years, leaving him homeless and bouncing between New York City shelters. A lawsuit he filed over the baseball bat incident in 2003 was thrown out as time-barred.
The 2025 GMV revival window was his way back into court, and now Diddy’s team is trying to slam that door shut too.
Diddy’s brief also fires a footnote at Burrowes’ infamous attorney, Tyrone Blackburn, citing courts that flagged his filings for “fabricated legal propositions derived from generative artificial intelligence,” a clear attempt to kneecap the opposition before anything goes further.
In 50 Cent’s Netflix documentary Sean Combs: The Reckoning, Burrowes described what he endured as “sexually deviant ways,” and childhood Diddy friend Tim “Dawg” Patterson backed him up in the doc, saying Burrowes was “probably the most legitimate” of anyone with grievances against Diddy.
Burrowes once warned them that Diddy “never” forgets a grudge, saying, “If he sees a snag in the sweater, he’ll pull,” and with Diddy currently serving 50 months at FCI Fort Dix on Mann Act convictions while his criminal appeal crawls through the Second Circuit, that sweater’s got a lot of loose threads right now.