Motown Records founder Berry Gordy Jr. is caught up in an ugly legal battle pitting his son against a former business advisor and romantic partner – a lawsuit he says is a “craven, desperate, and disgusting attempt” to “shake down” his family.
In a filing Monday in Los Angeles court, attorneys for Gordy demanded that he be dismissed from the case, arguing that the legendary record executive had been unfairly dragged into the litigation to distract from “wanton acts of embezzlement” committed by his son’s accuser.
“Extortion—though illegal and highly unethical—is a powerful weapon,” wrote Gordy’s lawyer Christopher Frost. “Nowhere is that more true than here.”
Gordy founded Motown in 1959, paving the way for the influential soul music sound that came to bear the same name. He eventually signed the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations and Stevie Wonder and many others to the label, before selling it off to MCA in 1988.
His strongly-worded response on Monday came amid a back-and-forth legal dispute between his son, Kennedy Gordy (better known by his stage name Rockwell), and Anita Hawker Thompson, who previously served as the CEO of Kennedy’s company, Rockwell Entertainment Enterprises.
Kennedy’s company sued Thompson last year, claiming that he suffers from “psychological impairments” and that Thompson had abused her power over him to steal $1.7 million in royalty payments that had been paid to the company.
Last week, Thompson responded by filing her own scathing countersuit, accusing Kennedy of subjecting her to “physical, sexual, and psychological abuse” during a years-long romantic relationship. In it, she also named the elder Gordy as a defendant, claiming he knew about his son’s abusive conduct and “tried to cover it up.”
But in Monday’s filing, Gordy’s attorneys blasted Thompson’s allegations as “a falsified, unverified narrative” that was aimed at distracting from the fact that she had “illegally abused her position of trust over Kennedy.”
“The response of Ms. Thompson [is] a craven, desperate, and disgusting attempt to further shake-down the Gordy family and to attempt to manufacture a fabricated claim to conveniently offset the claim for theft and conversion that she is facing — to which she has no legitimate legal or factual defense,” Berry’s attorney Frost writes.
In her lawsuit last week, Thompson’s attorneys included pages of disturbing allegations of “intimate partner violence,” including that Kennedy “beat, kicked, punched, and raped” her and then used “threats of violence and deportation to secure her silence.” But in his response Monday, the attorneys for the elder Gordy say that those “fabricated events” could only have plausibly taken place in the 1980s – well past the statute of limitations for bringing them to court.
“Ms. Thompson and her counsel, well-aware that the fabrications complained of occurred over thirty years ago, do not mention any dates when the fabricated wrongs are alleged to have taken place,” Gordy’s lawyers write.
Attorneys for both Thompson and Kennedy did not immediately return requests for comment on Tuesday.
