LOS ANGELES (CN) — An unnamed woman sued country music star Garth Brooks on Thursday, claiming Brooks violently raped her in a Los Angeles hotel room in 2019 and continually subjected her to sexual harassment while she worked for him.
The woman, who says she worked as a makeup artist and hair stylist for the Grammy-winning recording artist for about four years, brings civil claims of assault and battery in her lurid complaint in Los Angeles Superior court.
“At some point during the nightmare, Brooks even held her small body upside down by her feet and penetrated her,” she says in the complaint, filed in LA Superior Court. “Brooks also repeatedly slammed his penis into her vagina causing Ms. Roe’s back to keep hitting his body over and over with such force she felt as if he was breaking her in two. Disgustingly, Brooks insisted that Ms. Roe wear her eyeglasses while he carried out his sexual assault fantasy.”
The rape left the woman, identified in the complaint as Jane Roe, traumatized, and she considered suicide, she wrote. She also suffered from “debilitating pain in her neck and lower back, which she sought medical treatment for.”
In the following months, according to the plaintiff, Brooks repeatedly spoke to her in a sexually charged way and often touched her inappropriately — “repeatedly squeezing, touching and groping her breasts any time he could” on a subsequent trip to LA, for example.
“On too many occasions to list, Brooks would lasciviously stare at Ms. Roe’s breasts and pressure Ms. Roe to open her shirt to allow him to physically touch her breasts for purposes of his arousal after which Brooks would then masturbate,” says the woman in her complaint. Roe implies in the suit that other employees of Brooks’ “saw or heard instances of the unwanted physical groping.”
Brooks, who has sold more albums in the U.S. than any other artist besides The Beatles, has been married since 2005 to fellow country music star Trisha Yearwood, for whom Roe also once worked for.
In her lawsuit, Roe claims that she and Brooks sent numerous texts back and forth, some of which were incriminating, but that one day in 2020, Brooks “surreptitiously took her phone and deleted most of the text messages that he had sent her containing explicit sexual content.”
Sometime after that incident, Roe stopped working for Brooks, hired a lawyer and moved to Mississippi. The lawyer contacted Brooks and told him that his client planned to file a lawsuit against him.
On Sept. 13, Brooks, according to Roe’s complaint, filed a preemptive lawsuit against Roe in federal court in Mississippi. The complaint, filed as “John Doe vs. Jane Roe,” identifies its plaintiff as “a celebrity and public figure who resides in Tennessee,” and Roe as someone who “worked professionally with plaintiff as an independent contractor for approximately fifteen years.”
In the complaint, the unnamed celebrity accuses Roe of blackmail, saying that after he refused to give her financial assistance, she hired a lawyer to confront him with what he called “false and outrageous allegations of sexual misconduct she claims occurred years ago.”
The unnamed woman is represented in LA by law firm Girard Bengali and by New York-based firm Wigdor LLP.
Wigdor said in a written statement, “The complaint filed today demonstrates that sexual predators exist not only in corporate America, Hollywood and in the rap and rock and roll industries but also in the world of country music. We are confident that Brooks will be held accountable for his actions and his efforts to silence our client through the filing of a preemptive complaint in Mississippi was nothing other than an act of desperation and attempted intimidation.”