Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Faces 6 Lawsuits From Lawyer With a Hotline

The Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee filed suits in New York with new allegations of rape and sexual assault from 1995 to 2021. Mr. Combs denied the accusations.

The embattled music mogul Sean Combs is facing six more sexual assault lawsuits in New York, including one from a man who accused Mr. Combs of groping his genitals when he was 16, in what a team of lawyers say are the first filings from dozens of plaintiffs.

The lawsuits, filed on Monday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, also accuse Mr. Combs of raping two men and two women and forcing another man to perform oral sex in allegations that span from 1995 to 2021. All of the claims were filed anonymously.

The filings further intensify the legal troubles facing Mr. Combs, the longtime record executive and performer known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, as he awaits a trial for federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges in a Brooklyn jail. He has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers said in a statement in response to the new lawsuits that “Mr. Combs has never sexually assaulted anyone — adult or minor, man or woman.”

The new lawsuits were brought by a personal injury lawyer in Houston, Tony Buzbee, who has used Instagram and a widely publicized news conference to solicit clients. Mr. Buzbee detailed the scope of his work at the news conference this month, where he spoke in front of a backdrop displaying a large red hotline number that people with claims against Mr. Combs could call.

“After the indictment of Sean Combs and the announcement that we were pursuing these claims, the floodgates opened,” Mr. Buzbee said at the news conference.

In one of the lawsuits filed on Monday, a plaintiff recounts a 1998 encounter with Mr. Combs at one of the entertainer’s famous White Parties at his mansion in the Hamptons. The suit says the plaintiff, who was 16 at the time, bumped into Mr. Combs and shared his dreams of “becoming a star,” after which Mr. Combs told him that he needed to drop his pants. When the plaintiff complied, the suit says, Mr. Combs grabbed and squeezed his genitals.

Mr. Buzbee is a well-known figure in the world of plaintiff’s lawyers, securing settlements for at least 30 women who accused the N.F.L. quarterback Deshaun Watson of sexual misconduct during massage appointments. He said his staff is carefully vetting a large number of complaints about Mr. Combs that the law office has fielded since it began its outreach efforts. In one 24-hour period, Mr. Buzbee has said, the hotline received thousands of calls. The law firm’s website also uses a chatbot that asks if visitors are “victims of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs.”

Mr. Combs’s representatives have presented the operation as part of a “reckless media circus.” But on Monday, the forecasting of claims turned into concrete legal filings that the mogul must respond to in court.

“The press conference and 1-800 number that preceded today’s barrage of filings were clear attempts to garner publicity,” Mr. Combs’s lawyers said in their statement. “Mr. Combs and his legal team have full confidence in the facts, their legal defenses and the integrity of the judicial process.”

In two other suits filed on Monday, women accuse Mr. Combs of raping them at parties in New York City. One plaintiff accuses Mr. Combs of raping her in 1995 at a promotional party for a music video by the Notorious B.I.G., the rapper who was one of the early stars of Mr. Combs’s label, Bad Boy Records. The lawsuit says Mr. Combs asked the plaintiff to speak with him privately when she was dancing with friends, and then became violent after she rejected his advances.

“When plaintiff attempted to pull away, he violently struck her, slamming her head against the wall and causing her to fall to the floor,” the lawsuit says.

The suit says that after Mr. Combs raped her on a bathroom floor, he said, “You better not tell anyone about this, or you will disappear.”

Four of the plaintiffs in Monday’s lawsuits are men, including one who said he was working security at a White Party in the Hamptons in 2006 when Mr. Combs drugged him, pushed him into a van and raped him.

Another man’s lawsuit says that in 2008, the plaintiff was an adviser at Ecko, a competitor to Mr. Combs’s Sean John clothing brand, when he encountered Mr. Combs and three bodyguards in a stockroom at Macy’s flagship store in Manhattan. The lawsuit says the man was hit at the base of the neck, and then Mr. Combs forced his penis in the plaintiff’s mouth. The lawsuit, which also names Macy’s as a defendant, says the man reported the sexual assault to security and was fired about three weeks later.

Macy’s did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

All but one of the lawsuits filed on Monday are based on allegations that fall outside the statute of limitations for sexual assault, relying on a New York City provision, called the Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law, to revive the claims. There are court battles over the scope of the law, and some rulings have cast doubt on whether the law can be used to revive claims from the 1990s.

The deluge of lawsuits against Mr. Combs, 54, started last year after the singer Cassie, his former girlfriend, sued him, alleging years of physical and sexual abuse. Mr. Combs quickly settled, but nearly a dozen lawsuits followed, including seven from women accusing Mr. Combs of sexual assault. He has denied the allegations and his lawyers have been fighting the claims in court.

In the criminal case, Mr. Combs’s defense lawyers on Tuesday asked a judge to order that federal prosecutors disclose the identities of the alleged victims in the case, who have so far been unnamed, arguing that the government has been forcing the defense to play a “guessing game” made more challenging by an “onslaught of baseless allegations” in civil suits.

“These swirling allegations have created a hysterical media circus that, if left unchecked, will irreparably deprive Mr. Combs of a fair trial, if they haven’t already,” the lawyers wrote.

The defense team noted that the breadth of the government’s indictment, which accuses Mr. Combs of “persistent and pervasive pattern of abuse toward women and other individuals,” could be interpreted as “treating Mr. Combs’s entire sexual history over the past 16 years as part of the alleged criminal conspiracy.”

The civil suits filed on Monday came some two weeks after Mr. Buzbee announced his plan to file on behalf of multiple plaintiffs, a public approach to discussing litigation before the actual submission of legal papers that several legal experts characterized as somewhat unusual.

Stephen Gillers, a legal scholar who studies lawyer conduct, said he saw the news conference, while somewhat unique, as a form of free legal advertising, which is an accepted practice with professional rules attached. “The lawyers are announcing their volume of plaintiffs as a way to attract other plaintiffs,” he said.

He noted that in the news conference, Mr. Buzbee alluded to “powerful people” who would be “exposed” by the allegations, suggesting to him that the lawyers may be angling for settlements from celebrities other than Mr. Combs or corporations linked to the accusations. “I see this as possibly a warning to defendants,” Professor Gillers said.

Mr. Buzbee declined to participate in an interview but said in emailed responses to questions that the news conference allowed him to speak directly to potential victims and witnesses, and to send a message without a “litany of interviews.”

“I want people who have been scarred to know they are not alone,” he said in the email.

Mr. Buzbee added that his co-counsel, Andrew Van Arsdale, a lawyer in California who has been closely involved in sexual abuse cases against the Boy Scouts of America, received the initial calls about Mr. Combs. A large wave of calls came after Mr. Buzbee posted on Instagram that he was involved in the cases, he said.

Mr. Combs’s lawyers have highlighted that approach — including the hotline number — to try to undercut the wave of claims. Mr. Buzbee has said that the allegations are being carefully vetted. In the email, he said that the team involved more than 100 screeners and 30 lawyers.

Ben Sisario and Matt Stevens contributed reporting.