Singer Kesha alleges in a lawsuit that pop producer Dr. Luke—who’s co-written hits for her, Miley Cyrus, and Katy Perry, among many others—emotionally abused her for years, once threatened her physically, and on one occasion raped her. He’s filed a countersuit accusing her of extortion. From TMZ:
Kesha was sexually, physically, verbally and emotionally abused for 10 years by her producer, Dr. Luke, to the point where she nearly died.
According to a new lawsuit—obtained by TMZ—Kesha claims Dr. Luke was abusive towards her almost from the get-go—when she signed on with him at 18—and made repeated sexual advances toward her. She claims he would force her to use drugs and alcohol to remove her defenses.
The suit says that the producer raped Kesha after giving her the drug GHB, the New York Daily News reports:
Kesha, whose real name is Kesha Rose Sebert, claims she woke up naked in Dr. Luke’s bed the following afternoon feeling sore, sick and unable to remember how she got there.
“Ms. Sebert immediately called her mother and made a ‘fresh complaint,’ telling her that she was naked in Dr. Luke’s hotel room, she did not know where her clothes were, that Dr. Luke had raped her, and that she needed to go to the emergency room,” the blockbuster lawsuit claims.
“Ms. Sebert later learned that the ‘sober pills’ Dr. Luke had given her were actually a form of gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB), more commonly known as the date rape drug, allowing him to bring Ms. Sebert back to his hotel room alone and rape her while she was unconscious,” the lawsuit states.
Dr. Luke’s countersuit alleges that Kesha is fabricating allegations against him because she wants to terminate their contract, and that she has previously attempted to extort him by threatening to leak rumors about him to a blogger.
A New Yorker profile of Dr. Luke from last year alludes to tension between the two:
He signed Kesha (whose full name is Kesha Rose Sebert) as both a writer and an artist in 2005, when she was eighteen, and helped establish her with the hits “Right Round” and “Tik Tok.” But now that her pop-star dreams had come true she was proving hard to control. Relations reportedly became strained last year during the making of her sophomore album, “Warrior,” which Kesha wanted to use to establish her rock bona fides; others involved in the making of the record felt that she should continue in the party-girl dance-pop vein of her début, “Cannibal.” She recorded “Die Young,” produced by Dr. Luke, Cirkut, and Benny Blanco, and released it as the first single, in the fall of 2012. The song topped some charts, but immediately after the December 14th Newtown massacre it all but disappeared from the radio, and the Kesha haters went into a frenzy on Twitter. While Kesha had previously claimed to have written the lyrics by herself, on December 18th she tweeted back, “I Understand. I did NOT want to sing those lyrics and I was FORCED to.” When I asked Gottwald what was up with Kesha (he is also an executive producer of her MTV reality show, “My Crazy Beautiful Life”), he shrugged and said, “I haven’t heard from her in a while.”
Kesha and Dr. Luke were themselves the subject of a 2011 lawsuit filed by her former managers; that suit was settled.
