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A girl who filed a lawsuit accusing Neil Portnow, the previous head of the Grammy Awards, of drugging and raping her in a New York lodge room has requested a federal judge for her case to be dismissed.
The request by the girl, who filed her swimsuit anonymously in November, was addressed to Judge Analisa Torres of Federal District Court in Manhattan over the weekend by way of electronic mail, and it was posted on Monday to the court docket’s web site. Days earlier than, her attorneys had opposed a press release by Mr. Portnow’s attorneys to require the girl to make use of her actual identify within the case.
In her letter, the girl made clear that she was involved about her identification being revealed. She additionally famous a dispute along with her attorneys. Despite their opposition to Mr. Portnow’s request, she wrote that her attorneys’ submitting “didn’t precisely mirror my place.”
Also on Monday, her lawyer, Jeffrey R. Anderson, filed a movement to withdraw as her counsel. Mr. Anderson stated she had submitted the letter with out his data, and that “the attorney-client relationship has deteriorated past restore.” Reached by telephone on Tuesday, Mr. Anderson declined to remark.
The lady’s lawsuit, initially filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, arrived as a authorized window in New York was drawing to a detailed that had allowed folks to file civil fits alleging sexual assault even when the statute of limitations for his or her circumstances had expired. The case was eliminated to federal court docket in January.
The lady, who was recognized in her swimsuit solely as a musician from outdoors the United States, stated she met Mr. Portnow, then the chief government of the Recording Academy, at a Grammy occasion in New York in early 2018. According to her grievance, that June he invited her to a Manhattan lodge room the place he was staying. He gave her wine and he or she misplaced consciousness, in accordance with the swimsuit, and the girl stated that she awoke to seek out him “forcibly” penetrating her.
Mr. Portnow declined to touch upon Tuesday. But when the girl filed her swimsuit in November, he denied the accusations strongly, saying they had been “the product of the plaintiff’s creativeness.”
In a solution to her grievance final month, Mr. Portnow acknowledged that he met her at his lodge room and supplied her wine, however stated that “always his interactions with Plaintiff had been consensual.”
Lawyers for Mr. Portnow additionally stated that the girl had despatched him “a trove of emails and texts” after their encounter, proposing marriage and asking his assist in “writing a advice letter for her immigration utility.”
Federal courts enable plaintiffs to file circumstances anonymously in particular circumstances, together with if revealing their identification would expose them to a threat of bodily or psychological hurt. In court docket papers, Mr. Portnow’s attorneys argued that the girl’s causes for continuing anonymously, together with that she “seeks to defend their identification from the stigma related to sexual assault,” don’t fulfill these necessities.
In response, the girl’s attorneys stated that anonymity “has grow to be an accepted observe for sexual assault victims in New York state court docket,” and argued that she shouldn’t be recognized within the federal case. But the girl’s letter included what she stated had been quotations from emails from her attorneys, by which they informed her they believed that Mr. Portnow “will prevail” on a movement to compel her to make use of her actual identify, and added that “your identify shall be made public which is able to trigger hurt to you and your status.”
Mr. Portnow, 75, grew to become chief government of the Recording Academy in 2002. In 2018, on the peak of the #MeToo motion, he got here underneath harsh criticism for saying that ladies in music ought to “step up” to get larger recognition within the business, and he resigned from the group the next 12 months.
His successor, Deborah Dugan, was fired in early 2020, and in a authorized compliant accused the academy of a spread of abuses, together with voting irregularities, rampant conflicts of curiosity and overlaying up that Mr. Portnow had been accused of rape by the girl who later filed her swimsuit.
