An anonymous Chris Brown assault accuser identified as Jane Doe claims the rap star drugged and raped her on Sean “Diddy” Combs’ yacht in December 2020.
The allegation was made in Investigation Discovery’s Chris Brown: A History of Violence that premiered Sunday night on the true-crime network. The documentary explored Brown’s years of alleged offstage aggression, including intimate-partner violence, assault charges and sexual assault allegations that first came to light in 2009 when the star rapper pled guilty to a felony charge of physically assaulting former girlfriend Rihanna.
The ID doc provides graphic accounts of the assault by Brown on Rihanna while he drove a sports car and she was in the passenger seat. “He’s driving, punching her in the left eye with his right fist as he drives with his left hand, and this goes on for blocks,” retired Los Angeles Police Department sergeant and author Cheryl Dorsey says at one point in the documentary.
The ID true-crime feature also has a Jane Doe recounting being in Miami in 2020 and at a party on Star Island on Diddy’s yacht. Once on board, she says she noticed Brown and they started a conversation about her fledgling dancing career in Los Angeles.
Jane Doe recounted Brown handing her a drink, and then another. Before long, she felt sleepy and eventually found herself in a bedroom with Brown. “I remember I did lay back and I’m like, ‘Why can’t I get up?’ Next thing I know he was on top of me and I couldn’t move and I said ‘no’ and then I felt him… next thing I knew he was inside me,” she said, alleging a rape had taken place.
Jane Doe’s attorney, Ariel Mitchell, confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that she is representing her again after, in 2022, withdrawing from a lawsuit after text messages her client had sent to Brown surfaced after Jane Doe had denied they had existed. Mitchell says the text messages do not cast doubt on Jane Doe’s allegations against Brown. “I stand by her then and now. Then was not a question of the veracity of her claims. It was just how she neglected to provide us all of the requested evidence,” Mitchell said when reached on Monday.
A legal representative for Diddy denied the allegation involved their client when reached by THR.
Jane Doe isn’t alone in recalling alleged assaults by the R&B singer. The doc recalled in 2017 another girlfriend, Karrueche Tran, being granted a restraining order after she claimed in a court filing that Brown “punched me twice in the stomach,” threatened friends and “pushed me downstairs.”
Brown denied wrongdoing at the time, including with incidents involving Tran in 2015. Another alleged victim, Liziane Gutierrez, told the ID doc in 2016 she was backstage at a Brown concert and was invited to a party the pop idol was hosting in a hotel.
Before entering the private event, Guiterrez was asked to give up her cell phone, and instead put the device in her pocket. “When I first saw Chris Brown at the party, he was acting weird. Extremely weird. And then I decided to grab my phone and take a picture of him,” she says in the documentary.
But when Brown saw her snapping the pic, he came over and allegedly punched her in the face. “His security grabbed my phone and I got escorted out of the party. I’m not saying it was right what I did with my phone. I know that. But that doesn’t give you the right to punch me in the face. Just kick me out of the party,” Gutierrez said.
She filed a report with the Las Vegas Police Department, which decided against bringing charges. Brown’s attorney denied the allegations in the ID doc about Gutierrez and in a statement said “he never laid a hand” on her. THR received no comment from legal representatives for Gutierrez.
When the ID doc’s producers reached out to Brown and his representatives about claims made in the feature, an attorney for the singer said the allegations in the program were “malicious and false.”
The View co-host Sunny Hostin, a former federal prosecutor, led an after-show discussion on domestic violence that aired after the doc on Sunday night. Earlier, Hostin told THR she wants viewers who watched the Chris Brown: A History of Violence documentary Sunday night to know that intimate partner violence has no boundaries.
When also speaking to THR last week, ID President Jason Sarlanis said the Brown doc, which will also help launch ID’s third annual No Excuse for Abuse campaign, aims to “normalize surviving.”
Sarlanis argued the doc underscored barriers in the judicial system to curbing domestic violence. “Our legal system is systematically and institutionally set up to make it very difficult for survivors to get their justice at the time they are prepared and ready to seek it,” the true-crime network head told THR. “The statute of limitations when it comes to domestic violence is painfully short and very often part of how abusers abuse their victims is by gaslighting, coercive control, to the point where many victims don’t even acknowledge the domestic violence until the statute of limitations has ceased.”
English (US) ·