Although a judge said in a tentative ruling that he is inclined to deny the studio’s request to be removed as a co-defendant in an actor’s sexual assault/battery lawsuit that also names Tyler Perry as a party, the judge nonetheless took the case under submission.
Mario Rodriguez’s Los Angeles Superior Court suit was amended on April 21, shortly after attorneys for Perry and Lionsgate filed court papers with Judge Brock T. Hammond in which the studio asked for dismissal of Rodriguez’s one claim against Lionsgate for negligent retention. The updated suit added a cause of action for negligence.
The complaint was revised again on July 8. The amended complaints supersede the original filed last Dec. 26.
In a tentative ruling issued Monday, the judge said he believes Rodriguez’s attorneys have corrected the issues he had with the earlier versions of the lawsuit and its allegations pertaining to Lionsgate. But after hearing arguments Tuesday, the judge said he wants to ponder the issues further before issuing a final ruling.
In his tentative ruling, Hammond noted that the most recently amended suit alleges that Lionsgate learned through an audit that Perry, now 57, was “using his position as a producer to engage in sexual misconduct against aspiring actors cast in Lionsgate films and that he had done so for years.”
Rodriguez appeared in “Boo! A Madea Halloween” and accuses the filmmaker and studio mogul of leveraging his power in Hollywood to make sexual advances.
According to the Perry/Lionsgate attorneys, Rodriguez, a California resident, knows Perry is a Georgia resident and wants to avoid federal court.
But after a separate complaint was filed against Perry on behalf of another plaintiff and was transferred to federal court in Georgia, Rodriguez and his lawyer “asserted a single half-baked and legally deficient negligent retention claim against Lionsgate to defeat diversity,” the Perry/Lionsgate attorneys state in their court papers.
Diversity jurisdiction in federal court allows civil cases between residents of different states to be heard in federal court rather than state court, provided the amount in question exceeds $75,000.