Cassie asks a judge to end Clayton Howard's $35 million trafficking suit

Cassie Ventura wants Clayton Howard's $35 million case against her thrown out for good, and her lawyers have told a federal court that letting it stand would make other survivors think twice about coming forward. The motion asks US District Judge Anne Hwang to dismiss Howard's latest complaint permanently, and AllHipHop's Grouchy Greg Watkins reported it on August 27.

Howard, a former male escort who worked under the name Dave, first sued Cassie and Sean Combs in June 2025. He says the pair trafficked, drugged and sexually exploited him across paid encounters that ran for close to a decade, and he wants $35 million plus money for medical care, mental health treatment and medication. He has said the encounters wrecked his health and his construction business.

Her lawyer Douglas Wigdor framed the filing around the chilling effect: it is exactly this kind of harassing lawsuit, he said, that discourages real victims of sexual abuse from testifying truthfully as government witnesses. Cassie was a central prosecution witness at Combs' 2025 federal trial, which ended with an acquittal on racketeering and sex trafficking and a conviction on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.

The substance of her defence is that Howard's own complaint undercuts him. Her lawyers point out that his account repeatedly casts Combs as the person who controlled the encounters, directed the security staff and decided when they ended, and that the same filing includes descriptions of Combs beating her, including the 2016 hotel surveillance footage. On the chlamydia claim, her attorneys argue he conflates urinary tract infections with sexually transmitted ones and has not established that she knew she was infected.

Howard lost separate ground the same week. US Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn refused on August 27 to take judicial notice that he is a sex trafficking victim, ruling in his $20 million Netflix case that the status is subject to reasonable dispute given Combs' acquittal on those counts. Netburn was careful about what that did and did not decide: she made no finding that Howard lied, and left him free to try to prove trafficking later.

That Netflix suit accuses the makers of Sean Combs: The Reckoning of cutting his account to fit a story in which Cassie is the victim, and names Netflix, 50 Cent, G-Unit Films and Television, House of Nonfiction, director Alexandria Stapleton and West Tower Road. The defendants have moved to dismiss all 11 claims, and that request is still pending. A hearing on Cassie's own motion is set for October 21. Combs, meanwhile, has countersued a producer over a different Netflix documentary and had his prison release date moved up. More sits on the rnb-soul hub.