Diplo has denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by a woman he calls an "obsessed fan" and "stalker," but he could still face criminal charges.
The Los Angeles City Attorney's Office is considering filing charges of invasion of privacy and intentionally giving someone a sexually transmitted infection, according to Buzzfeed. A rep for the Los Angeles City's Attorney's Office told E! News they are "reviewing the referral."
Buzzfeed said the investigation into Diplo stems from a complaint made with the Los Angeles Police Department in October 2020, in which a 25-year-old woman accused the musician of recording sexually explicit videos of her without her permission, distributing at least one without her consent, and knowingly infecting her with chlamydia. Her allegations are also detailed in a past temporary restraining order request and in a civil lawsuit she filed this year, the website reported.
The musician, whose real name is Thomas Wesley Pentz, responded to the allegations on Instagram on Wednesday, Oct. 6, referring to the accuser by the initials SA.
"It was my goal to never address a stalker," the 42-year-old musician wrote. "She was an obsessed fan of mine, and after I relinquished all contact with her, it appears that her only purpose in life has been to disrupt my work, my business, harass me and my close friends and attack me and threaten my family."
He added, "To be clear, SA was not a minor when I had conversations or sexual intercourse with her…This girl was nothing but a scammer that coerced me into meeting her twice."
"I had a night of consensual sex with her," Diplo wrote. "Basically, SA reached out to me and I declined a few times but at one time decided to meet her.
He said the two exchanged texts for a few months but that the woman later "started to become obsessed with me, it began a nightmare of almost three years of her harassing and threatening me my family and my friends."
He continued, "We began to speak again and she had flown to Las Vegas to go to one of my shows and said she had a group of friends that wanted to hook up...Her and her friends ended up at an after party and asked me to go to my room, we all ended up having sex that night."
Diplo wrote that in April, he filed a civil lawsuit against SA for stalking, trespass and revenge porn. In June, she filed her own lawsuit against him, claiming sexual battery, assault, defamation, infliction of emotional distress and fraud, and also alleging that he pursued her when she was underage, had sex with her when she was an adult and never disclosed he had a sexually transmitted disease, TMZ reported.
The musician wrote in his post that her lawsuit is "filled with lies which can be proven by SA's own texts and posts," some of which he included in his Instagram post but which E! News cannot independently verify.
"In her complaint, SA says that I raped her. But in a post, she admits that I never raped her," wrote the 42-year-old musician. "In her complaint, SA says I contacted her in 2014 and texted her to send nudes when she was a minor. This is also a lie and her own texts to me prove this as well...in her complaint, SA said I gave her chlamydia, but her own text shows that this is not true."
Diplo continued, "This is so frustrating and embarrassing. I am not this person and I won't be extorted by anyone no matter how stinging the press can be. Even over the past 2 years I've never been bothered by these rumors if anything it has made me stronger and smarter, all of my friends and partners have never questioned me and that was what has been important to me the people in my life know me for who I really am. I will continue to do everything I can to end this in the most respectful way but I will not give in to lies and harassment."
In November 2020, a month after the woman filed her complaint with the LAPD, she obtained a temporary restraining order against Diplo, accusing him of "distributing revenge porn," an allegation he denied. Diplo obtained a restraining order against her as well, and both orders were dismissed in January after their lawyers did not appear at a hearing, Buzzfeed reported, adding that the woman's previous lawyer, Lisa Bloom, and her new lawyers did not respond to requests for comment on their recent report.
Diplo has been accused of sexual misconduct before. This past July, another woman sued him for allegedly coercing her to perform oral sex and recording the incident, which allegedly took place in a Las Vegas hotel room, without her consent, TMZ reported. She later withdrew her filing, saying in a statement to Billboard, "In light of the evidence and after consultation with my attorneys, I have decided to withdraw my lawsuit. No payment was offered or requested. I regret filing the lawsuit."
Diplo's lawyer had told TMZ in a statement that the woman's complaint was "completely outrageous, wildly untrue and yet also entirely predictable, given that it simply repeats the exact same claim already made by the plaintiff's friend [SA], an individual who has been harassing Mr. Pentz and his family for more than a year and already has repeatedly violated the restraining order issued against her."
In his recent Instagram post, Diplo wrote, "The Las Vegas experience – and the girl's warning about SA came back two years later when, it appears that SA encouraged her friend to file a lawsuit in Nevada that fabricated the entire experience. It only took two days for me to find videos from that night that SA and her friend actually shot on my phone of the hotel room experience. Her friend's lawyers and her friend dropped the case immediately."
—Reporting by Spencer Lubitz