Jake Paul is addressing TikTok star Justine Paradise's claim that he sexually assaulted her in July 2019.
Paul's lawyer, Daniel E. Gardenswartz, said in a statement to E! News, "Our client is aware of the recent allegation against him. While others have already begun to debunk the claim alleged against him, our client categorically denies the allegation and has every intention of aggressively disproving it and pursuing legal action against those responsible for the defamation of his character."
The statement concluded, "Our client believes that any false allegations diminish the credibility of those who have truly been victims of misconduct."
Paradise accused Paul of sexual assault in a YouTube video uploaded Friday, April 9. In the 20-minute-long clip, Paradise recalled visiting Paul and his friend's shared home, which the group referred to as the Team 10 house, in July 2019.
According to Paradise, she and Paul met through mutual friends and had been casually hanging out that summer. Their relationship later turned physical when Paul kissed her at his house, which Paradise said she was OK with.
"Jake pulled me into this little corner area in the studio and started kissing me," Paradise remembered. "I was fine with that. I did think he was cute."
After briefly kissing, Paradise said they went to his room where they danced and kissed a bit more. However, Paradise said she changed her mind when he "took it to his bed," because "sex is very special and important" to her.
"Normally, everybody respects me when I don't want to do sexual things, so I thought that it was fine if I went in his room," she explained. "I thought it would be fine to kiss him, because I thought he would stop if I didn't want to do anything else."
But when Paradise protested, she claimed he told her, "If nothing is going to happen, then what's the point?" He then allegedly sexually assaulted her.
"He didn't ask for consent or anything," she alleged. "That's not OK. On no level at all is that OK."
Following the alleged incident, Paradise said he was "cold" towards her, describing how "up until this point, he had been nice to me." She said his behavior made a "complete 180" and there was "no contact" on Paul's part.
"I wanted to talk to him about how that made me feel, because somewhere in my brain I was thinking, 'What if he didn't do this to me on purpose? What if he didn't know how this made me feel?'" she explained. "I just wanted talk to him and tell him, 'Hey, I didn't consent for this. It made me feel so awful.'"
Paradise further claimed, "But I couldn't tell him, because he never responded."
In addition, Paradise said she never publicly discussed the allegations because when she first visited the Team 10 house she signed a non-disclosure agreement. She said, "I thought if you sign an NDA, you're signing away your rights to talk about anything basically."
Now, she said she wants share her side of the story in the hopes of spreading awareness about the importance of consent and to make Paul aware of "what he did." As she put it, "I've thought about this literally every single day since it happened. But the more and more I think about it, the more I realize, no one can be doing that and think that it's something right to do."