Three women who have accused Russell Simmons of sexual assault say the hip-hop mogul has failed to pay them nearly $8 million to settle confidential agreements, according to recent court filings.
Tina Klein-Baker, Toni Sallie and Alexia Norton Jones stated in filings this month with New York County Supreme Court that Simmons had reneged on payments agreed upon as part of confidential settlements that each of the women entered into separately with Simmons in 2023.
Simmons owes Baker $4.95 million, Sallie $3 million and Jones $200,000, according to the filings, known as confessions of judgment.
Under the settlements, Simmons did not admit any wrongdoing, and the confidential agreements do not explicitly state the women’s claims against him. Sallie’s and Jones’ agreements say that the amount to be paid each woman was for their “alleged personal, physical injuries and sickness.”
The claims mark the latest allegations against Simmons. Last year, three other women — Sil Lai Abrams, Sherri Abernathy and Wendy Carolina Franco — filed similar claims in New York against Simmons, alleging he failed to pay about $3 million as part of confidential settlement agreements he reached with them in 2023.
Patricia Glaser, Simmons’ attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2017, Simmons stepped down from Def Jam Records, which he co-founded, after multiple women publicly accused him of sexual assault, which he has repeatedly denied.
Five of the six women have publicly accused Simmons of sexual assault in previously published accounts. Some of them also participated in the documentary “On the Record.”
Baker, a singer, accused Simmons of raping her in the early 1990s when he was her manager, according to a 2017 article in the New York Times.
In the article, Sallie, a music journalist, alleged that Simmons raped her at a party in 1988, a year after they had briefly dated.
In 2018, Jones, then an aspiring model, told Variety that Simmons raped her in 1990 in his apartment after a date.
Simmons denied the claims by Baker, Sallie and Jones.
Simmons was the subject of a Los Angeles Times article in 2017 in which five women accused him of sexual misconduct that occurred over three decades.
He denied the claims. “These new stories range from the patently untrue to frivolous and hurtful claims,” he said in a statement to The Times. “I want to restate categorically what I have said previously: I have never been violent or abusive to any women in any way at any time in my entire life.”
In December 2023, Simmons appeared on an episode of “In Depth with Graham Bensinger” in which he said he had a history of being in “compromising situations,” but denied the claims against him, saying that he had taken “nine lie detector tests.”
The interview appeared the same year in which he entered into the confidential agreements with the six women.
“Each of these women entered into settlement agreements with Simmons that are binding contracts. His serial refusal to be bound by these agreements is outrageous,” said Andrew Wilson, an attorney representing Abrams, Abernathy and Franco.
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