After her resounding victory at a jury trial three months ago, Cardi B prevailed again Friday over the security guard who claimed the Grammy-winning rapper scratched her face with an acrylic fingernail outside a Beverly Hills doctor’s office in 2018.
Los Angeles County Judge Ian Fusselman denied plaintiff Emani Ellis’s bid for a new trial, finding no basis to overturn the unanimous verdict. He rejected Ellis’ claim that two eyewitnesses should have been barred for late disclosure and dismissed the argument that jurors were “intimidated” by Cardi, born Belcalis Almánzar, after she threw a pen outside the courthouse shortly before the Sept. 2 verdict in her favor.
Video shows Almánzar throwing the pen to the ground after YouTube vlogger Donat Ricketts shouted questions at her about her rumored pregnancy with partner Stefon Diggs. Almánzar was secretly pregnant during the trial and did not announce she was expecting until two weeks later, on Sept. 17. In the video, Almánzar tells Ricketts, “Stop disrespecting me.”
On Friday, Judge Fusselman read a sworn declaration in which Ricketts claimed the pen bounced off the ground and struck him. Ricketts also claimed a juror saw the incident and approached him afterward with a group of people who asked if he planned to sue. “I advised them that I was not planning to sue,” Ricketts wrote. In filings opposing the motion for a new trial, Almánzar’s lawyers said the pen “hit no one,” and any suggestion jurors might have been intimidated was hearsay. The judge agreed, noting Ellis’s lawyer had sought a jury instruction about the incident that would have ensured jurors learned of it. If anything, he said, jurors might have viewed the incident as supporting Ellis’s claims rather than frightening them.
“We’re speculating about how it impacted them,” the judge said. “Wouldn’t that tend to help your case, rather than hurt it? Isn’t that why you wanted the jury to find out about it? You came into court and said, ‘I want jury to know this just happened.’”
Judge Fusselman said the jurors paid close attention to the trial and returned a verdict based on the evidence. “They were free to ask any questions or make any comments, and they didn’t. I don’t find anything outside the courtroom had any impact on the jury’s deliberations,” he said.
Jurors needed only an hour of deliberation to side with Almánzar on Sept. 2. They said Ellis failed to prove the rapper physically assaulted her on Feb. 24, 2018, after the women got into a heated confrontation because Almánzar believed Ellis was filming her outside the obstetrician’s office while she was secretly pregnant with her first child with Migos rapper Offset. Almánzar hadn’t yet told her parents she was expecting, and she considered Ellis’ actions to be a violation of her privacy surrounding something “sacred,” her lawyer argued at trial.
During her two days on the witness stand. Almánzar was adamant she never touched Ellis. She claimed Ellis was the one who stalked her down the hallway and backed her up against a wall. In colorful testimony that spawned several viral one-liners, Almánzar said she and Ellis engaged in a “verbal altercation” only. “She didn’t hit me. I didn’t hit her. There was no touch,” she testified.
In his failed motion for a new trial, Ellis’ lawyer Ron Rosen Janfaza claimed Almánzar “intentionally hid” the identity of the obstetrician and medical office assistant who became the rapper’s star witnesses. On the stand, Dr. David Finke and receptionist Tierra Malcolm told jurors they ran to the hallway when they heard the women yelling. They said Ellis had a phone in her hand and appeared to be the aggressor. Malcolm testified that a few months after the incident, Ellis called and asked if she would assist with an employment claim related to the incident. Malcolm said she declined. “I didn’t think if I told my truth [that] it would help her,” she told jurors. In her own testimony, Almánzar said she only visited Dr. Finke that one time, randomly, as a precaution while traveling in Los Angeles for work. For that reason, she wasn’t sure of his name in the early stages of the lawsuit, she said.
“[It] is undisputed that defendant’s counsel learned of the doctor’s name by repeatedly going office-to-office in his building,” Almánzar’s lawyers wrote in their filing explaining why it took them so long to identify Finke and Malcolm. “Importantly, plaintiff knew all along the identity of the doctor and his receptionist who intervened. Plaintiff was working as a security guard at the building, and shortly after the incident, plaintiff tried to enlist Ms. Malcolm in plaintiff’s scheme to sue defendant.”
On Friday, Judge Fusselman said that while it was true that he allowed the defense to add Finke and Malcolm after an initial cut-off, Ellis was allowed to add two names to her own proposed witness list even later. The judge also made it clear he planned to sanction Rosen Janfaza for his conduct during the trial. The judge said Rosen Janfaza repeatedly claimed to jurors that Ellis was treated by a psychologist, even though the doctor was barred as a witness, and jurors heard no evidence Ellis ever met the doctor face-to-face.
“I have trouble believing it was an innocent mistake when you did it over and over again,” the judge said Friday, adding that he planned to issue an order that would require Rosen Janfaza pay attorney’s fees to defense lawyers Lisa F. Moore, Peter Anderson, and Eric Lamm related to the defense request that he be held in contempt.
Shortly after winning the case in September, Almánzar released special “Courtroom Edition” CD covers for her sophomore album, Am I the Drama?, which showcased her viral moments and hairstyles during the trial. The civil court victory wasn’t her first. She previously scored a $4 million jury verdict against celebrity gossip vlogger Latasha Kebe, professionally known as Tasha K. A New York judge also sided with Almánzar and dismissed a libel lawsuit that named her as a defendant alongside her sister, Hennessy. Almánzar further won at a California-based federal trial where she was accused of using a portion of a man’s back tattoo on the cover of her early mixtape Gangsta Bitch Music Vol. 1.