Lawyers for DJ and producer Diplo announced that they’ve reached a global “resolution in principle” on Monday to end his tangled legal dispute with Shelly Auguste, a woman he had a sexual relationship with in 2019.
The last-minute deal averted a trial set to begin next Monday. If the trial had proceeded, it would have consolidated Diplo’s stalking, trespassing and revenge porn claims against Auguste with her dueling claims of sexual battery and assault filed against the musician.
“We have a resolution in principle. We’re probably days, not weeks, away from getting it signed. There are one or two paragraphs to kind of tweak. We sent [revisions] over the weekend,” Diplo’s lawyer Brian Elliot Turnauer told the court.
When Judge Rolf M. Treu asked if Auguste’s lawyer, Kimberly Casper, agreed with the settlement claim, Casper responded that she did. Judge Treu then vacated the trial date and said the parties should return next Monday to hopefully have a signed settlement that would dismiss the case. (Lawyers on both sides declined to comment as they left the courtroom in downtown Los Angeles.)
Diplo, born Thomas Wesley Pentz, has been locked in a dispute with Auguste since she filed for a restraining order in November 2020. She claimed in the filing that she met Pentz online when she was 17 in 2014 and that he “groomed” her into exchanging sexually intimate messages. She accused him of posting a sexually explicit image of her on an anonymous Twitter account as “revenge” because she had claimed online that he filmed one of their sexual encounters without her consent.
Pentz responded by filing his own restraining order petition on Dec. 8, 2020. He described Auguste as an “obsessed fan” who ”became vindictive” when he refused to continue to see her after a “very brief sexual encounter.” He claimed they met in March 2018, not 2014, and admitted they had sex in April 2019 and again in Las Vegas in July 2019. He claimed Auguste sent him a barrage of unsolicited “lewd and obscene” messages after that and became upset when he “refused to engage.” Pentz then accused Auguste of sending at least four sexually explicit videos of him to the mother of one of his children. He called himself a victim of “revenge porn.”
In January 2021, the parties entered into a settlement concerning their requests for mutual restraining orders, court records show. The deal restricted their rights to publish information and provided for binding arbitration of any disputes. On April 21, 2021, Pentz demanded arbitration because Auguste allegedly continued to make social media postings. But he also sued Auguste a week later in open court, accusing her of stalking, trespassing and revenge porn. Two months later, in June 2021, Auguste filed her own lawsuit against Pentz, alleging he “groomed her since she was a teenager” and forced her into sex in Las Vegas on July 9, 2019 when she was highly intoxicated.
On Sept. 6, 2022, an arbitrator found that both sides had violated their prior agreement, a court record obtained by Rolling Stone reveals. The record states that while both parties were found at fault, it was Pentz who was awarded $1.2 million in damages. It’s not clear what the status of the award was when the parties entered negotiations for the new global resolution.
The new deal announced Monday comes a week after a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that a different woman must use her real name if she chooses to proceed with the separate “revenge porn” lawsuit that she filed against the famous DJ last June. The woman’s lawyer said in a statement to Rolling Stone that she plans to appeal the decision.
In that case, the Jane Doe plaintiff alleges she was 21 years old in April 2016 when she began communicating with Pentz, who was 37 at the time, over Snapchat. According to the woman, she and Pentz later engaged in an intimate relationship that lasted several years. She acknowledges that occasionally she allowed Pentz to record them having sex but claims she “never gave him permission to distribute those images and videos to third parties.” She alleges that between 2018 and 2023, Pentz recorded himself having sex with her and then shared the video with others over both text messaging and Snapchat. The woman claims that a different woman contacted her in November 2023 to say Pentz had shared some of the “intimate material” with her on Snapchat on Oct. 14, 2018.
Pentz, 46, denies any wrongdoing. His lawyer, Bryan Freedman, has called the Jane Doe’s lawsuit an “obvious shakedown” attempt. “Time and again, Wes has been targeted by a group of untrustworthy individuals and their unscrupulous lawyers, cobbling together falsehoods in search of a meritless payday,” Freedman said. “This suit seems to be just more of the same, which is why we have no reason to believe that this will end any differently than all the others.”