Nicki Minaj and husband Kenneth Petty have been ordered to pay $500,000 to a security guard over an alleged backstage beating that left the man with a broken jaw, a Los Angeles judge ruled Friday.
Security staffer Thomas Weidenmuller sued the “Barbie World” rapper and her husband two years ago, alleging Petty ambushed him from behind and sucker punched him in the face as retribution for Weidenmuller stepping in to defend a female security guard during a dispute with Minaj at a 2019 concert in Frankfurt, Germany.
According to Weidenmuller, Minaj became visibly frustrated and blamed the female guard for allowing a fan to breach a barricade and climb on stage with her. Minaj allegedly started recording the female security guard as she berated her. Weidenmuller says he interceded and told Minaj it wasn’t fair for the guard’s work reputation to be “ruined” on social media. In response, Minaj allegedly threw a shoe at Weidenmuller, but missed. Weidenmuller claims Petty later accused him of disrespecting Minaj and forcefully struck him in the face, leaving him “stunned and disoriented.”
“I felt a blinding pain in my head, neck, face and jaw. I could tell in that instant that something was seriously wrong with my jaw,” he wrote in a court filing. He said medics called an ambulance to take him to a hospital. He underwent the first of several surgeries and stayed there for ten days, he said.
“I now have five plates in my jaw, and my jaw has not yet been fully reconstructed. The doctors must still insert implants into my jaw as a part of the reconstruction process. In the interim, the doctors have inserted donor bones from a deceased person into my mouth in order to preserve space for the future implants,” he wrote in a sworn statement.
Weidenmuller previously asked for around $21,000 to cover medical bills and $700,000 for his ongoing injury and emotional pain and suffering. The judge trimmed it down to $503,318 when she awarded the money Friday under a default judgment because Minaj and Petty never responded to the lawsuit.
Weidenmuller’s lawyers told the court they made repeated attempts to serve Minaj and Petty with the complaint but were never successful. They mailed copies and sent a process server to the couple’s gated community in Calabasas, Calif., but never made contact. They eventually published the summons in a newspaper.
Reps for Minaj and Petty did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Rolling Stone.
Petty, 45, was placed on up to 120 days of house arrest last Fall after he “was recorded on video making threatening remarks towards a specific individual while in the company of someone with a criminal record,” U.S. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald ruled on September 20, 2023. He consented to the modification of the terms of his release after he was sentenced to three years of probation for failing to register as a sex offender in California. He was previously convicted of a 1994 rape in New York.