Garth Brooks filed a preemptive lawsuit against his sexual assault accuser in which he claimed that he was the victim, DailyMail.com can reveal.
The country music star, 62, claimed she was an extorter who threatened to ruin his reputation if she didn’t get a multi-million-dollar payday, according to his lawsuit.
Brooks’ suit, obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com, was filed anonymously in federal court in Mississippi last month after receiving a ‘demand letter’ from her attorney.
He was at the time aware that his former makeup artist, known only as Jane Roe, was gearing up to make a civil claim of her own in California.
Brooks’s complaint puts a very different spin on the events alleged in Thursday’s filing that accused him of assault, sexual battery, and gender violence.
Garth Brooks, 62, has been sued by a makeup artist who worked for his wife of nearly two decades, Trisha Yearwood, 60; Brooks and Yearwood are pictured in 2023
Roe insisted that she was exposed to a sexually hostile work environment and ultimately raped by Brooks on a work trip to Los Angeles in 2019.
But the singer denied any such acts and claimed that her complaint was a money grab prompted by financial difficulties that she wanted him to solve.
Far from fleeing from an abusive employer, Brooks alleged Roe sued him only after he declined to give her a salaried job with medical benefits.
According to Brooks, she did so after numerous threats to sue unless he paid her ‘millions of dollars not to file the suit’.
DailyMail.com has ascertained that Brooks is the person behind the Mississippi lawsuit after Roe’s lawyers revealed the megastar had filed a preemptive suit in the state.
Roe worked for Brooks as an independent contractor for roughly 15 years before moving from Tennessee to Mississippi in May 2020.
Brooks, filing as ‘John Doe,’ claimed, ‘Soon after moving to Mississippi, the defendant apparently encountered financial difficulties and asked Plaintiff for financial assistance.
‘Plaintiff complied out of loyalty, friendship and a desire to improved defendant’s condition.
‘But defendant’s demands for financial assistance only increased, with defendant ultimately asking plaintiff for salaried employment and medical benefits.’
Brooks is pictured at the 2020 Billboard Music Awards, holding an Icon Award
Brooks identified himself as ‘John Doe’ and argued his need for anonymity in the court filing, hoping the matter would never become public if the woman didn’t follow through
Brooks refused and, he claimed, ‘she responded with false and outrageous allegations of sexual misconduct she claims occurred years ago’.
An attorney acting for Roe on July 17 sent Brooks a ‘demand letter alleging a litany of sexual misconduct…ranging from allegations of sexual “grooming”, creation of a sexually hostile work environment, unwanted sexual touching, and sexual assault’.
In his lawsuit, Brooks claimed Roe also alleged her belief that he, ‘planned to hire someone to murder her.’ This allegation was not included in Roe’s own lawsuit.
Brooks claimed the demand letter was the first time he heard any of the allegations being made against him.
He stated that the letter threatened to ‘publicly file’ a civil complaint – the draft of which was included – unless he ‘agreed to pay… millions of dollars’.
‘The letter referred to various celebrity sexual misconduct lawsuits featuring multi-million-dollar jury awards,’ his lawsuit claimed.
In a follow-up letter dated August 23, 2024, Roe again ‘offered to refrain from publicly filing her false and defamatory lawsuit…in exchange for a multi-million-dollar payment’.
Brooks claimed: ‘She threatened that if [Brooks] failed to meet this demand, he would face exposure of many millions of dollars ‘based on [his] net worth.’
Brooks and Yearwood are pictured at a Grammy tribute to Paul Simon at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in April 2022
As the Recording Industry Association of America’s top solo artist in history, selling nearly 150 million albums, the Friends in Low Places, singer has an estimated net worth of between $300 million and $350 million.
He has at times been the highest-paid celebrity on the planet. Between June 2017 and June 2018, he earned $45 million. In the same period in 2019 – the year Roe accuses him of raping her – he earned $25 million.
Brooks’s country singer wife, Trisha Yearwood’s own wealth brings their net worth as a couple to around $400 million.
Married for 21 years, Yearwood, 60, and Brooks have homes in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as well as Nashville, Tennessee, and Malibu, California.
Brooks broke his silence on Thursday night, hours after issuing a strenuous legal denial of the allegations of rape and battery claims leveled by the make-up artist whom he has known for more than 20 years.
Sharing an update to Instagram after his show at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Brooks wrote to fans that he ‘really needed this’.
Uploading a photograph of the huge crowd who turned out to cheer him on he wrote, ‘If ever there was a night that I really needed this, TONIGHT was that night! Thank you for my life!!!!love, g.’
The plaintiff was originally hired to do hair and makeup for Yearwood, and Brooks eventually enlisted her to do so for him, she claims; Brooks and Yearwood pictured last month
For their part, Roe’s legal team accused Brooks of attempting to ‘game’ the legal system with last month’s preemptive strike.
‘With a draft of Ms. Roe’s California sexual assault complaint in hand, Mr. Doe raced to this courthouse in an obvious attempt to further control and bully his sexual assault victim,’ their response to his federally filed suit, seen by DailyMail.com, read.
They claimed he did so while feigning interest in settlement talks to avoid the lawsuit they had yet to file.
In that suit, new details of which can be revealed by DailyMail.com, Roe made multiple claims of assault and sexual impropriety at Brooks’s hands.
She claimed he ‘took advantage’ of the financial hardship which she shared with him in 2019 and ‘seized the opportunity to subject [her] to a side of Brooks that he conceals from the public’.
According to Roe, that side ‘believes he is entitled to sexual gratification when he wants it, and using a female employee to get it, is fair game’.
Roe accused Brooks of emerging naked from a shower on one occasion, ‘with an erection’ that he forced her to touch, grabbing her hand and telling her that he fantasized about the moment and wanted her to perform a sex act on him.
She claimed things escalated in May 2019 when he asked her to travel with him to Los Angeles for a Grammy tribute to Sam Moore. She claimed he booked a one-bedroom hotel suite and refused to provide her with her own room.
Brooks is pictured being honored by the Kennedy Center in 2021
In her suite she claimed that she – less than five feet tall and 100 pounds – was subjected to a brutal rape by Brooks who, at six-foot tall and nearly 300 pounds, could easily physically dominate her.
She also claimed he sent her explicit texts and encouraged her to sext him; that he boasted that he had ‘f****d multiple women in every corner of a hotel room,’ ‘white, black, brown, or whatever…on every surface’.
Brooks also repeatedly spoke of having a threesome with Yearwood and Roe and repeatedly exposed himself to her and groped her body including her breasts, the lawsuit claimed.
Strikingly, Roe believed Yearwood ‘overheard [his suggestion of a threesome] on at least one occasion,’ and that his wife was present for one particularly lewd conversation in which Brooks spoke of inventing a shampoo bottle that would double as a dildo.
Roe claimed the conversation made her so uncomfortable that she would not join in, which angered Brooks so much he, ‘slammed his fists down on the kitchen counter in frustration so hard that items on the counter moved and he leaned in and spoke in a threatening manner to Ms. Roe’.
