Smokey Robinson sues rape accusers for defamation, elder abuse
He is suing his accusers for $500 million (£370 million).
The Motown legend states that he and his wife, Frances, have consistently treated people who work for them with nothing but respect, according to legal documents obtained by Dailymail.com.
The Tracks of My Tears singer likened the legal efforts of the four former employees suing him to a shakedown.
He has staunchly denied abusing any of the women, and even compared them to "extended family members".
The singer-songwriter and his lawyer noted that he and Frances had gifted the four plaintiffs concert tickets, cash for emergency dental procedures, and other items over the timeframe in which they worked for him.
The couple have named the four plaintiffs in the lawsuit, alleging defamation of character, emotional distress, financial elder abuse, invasion of privacy and civil conspiracy, among other charges.
Robinson has requested that his accusers be publicly named, as the media has already commenced reporting details of the story, making it impractical for them to stay anonymous.
Robinson was named in the $50 million (£37 million) suit from the four plaintiffs, who say the veteran performer committed acts of sexual battery, assault, false imprisonment and gender violence.
Robinson has denied all of the allegations against him, which are under investigation.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indianapolis Star
6 hours ago
- Indianapolis Star
'Utterly chilling': IU professor sanctioned over Indiana's intellectual diversity law
Indiana University has sanctioned an outspoken professor at its Bloomington campus after finding an anonymous complaint about his classroom conduct had merit — likely making him the first professor to be punished under Indiana's new intellectual diversity law enacted last year. However, Germanic studies professor Ben Robinson told IndyStar that he believes the university did not conduct an investigation to uphold its sanctions. And considering some odd circumstances in his case, he said, he's concerned the university is making an example out of him. "There's no reference to any sort of discovery process whatsoever," he said. "It was clearly a hastily and thoughtlessly written, anonymous complaint in a reporting system that had no consequences. ... It was elevated into an SEA 202 complaint." IU policy on reviewing such complaints states the university will conduct a investigation if a preliminary review found the complaint had merit. It's unclear if this step was taken before Robinson was sanctioned. The complaint lodged against Robinson is one of at least 14 grievances investigated in the state so far. It's unclear whether disciplinary action has been taken in most of those cases. Under Senate Enrolled Act 202, a professor must embrace free expression and "intellectual diversity," while not lecturing about political views unrelated to their field. The law requires those qualities to be considered during tenure review and creates a mechanism for students to report professors. After a "thorough review," Rick Van Kooten, executive dean of IU's College of Arts and Sciences, found the complaint reflected that the professor conflated "personal life experiences, academic scholarship and pedagogical practice" in violation of SEA 202, according to the five-page disciplinary letter. "This blurring of roles compromises the integrity of the classroom environment and risks confusing or alienating students," the letter reads. "While this is a matter of degree, it serves as a formal warning to Prof. Robinson to exercise greater care in ensuring that personal experiences and opinions do not unduly influence his pedagogy." IU spokesperson Mark Bode said the university does not comment on personnel matters. He did not respond to an IndyStar question about whether it conducted an investigation. The complaint against Robinson was filed last year and cited classroom comments he made about the university restricting free speech rights, times he's been arrested while protesting, and his views regarding the state of Israel. "He has used class time to say that the university is restricting people's free speech. He has talked about being arrested during class time several times," the complaint reads. "He talks negatively about the state of Israel and describes the war in untrue and unfair ways." Robinson has been a vocal critic of the IU administration, including its now-struck-down expressive activities policy, and was arrested during the Bloomington campus' Palestine solidarity encampment in spring 2024. He has also been the target of external "watchdog" groups seeking to publicize and condemn political activities of faculty. The professor said he plans to fight the sanction. According to the letter, he can request a campus Faculty Board of Review to investigate whether university officials have infringed on his right to academic freedom. The complaint isn't valid, Robinson asserts, both because of its anonymity and its origin. According to IU policy, a SEA 202 complaint will only be considered if it is submitted by a student or university employee; the policy does not specify protocol for anonymous complaints. In his letter, Van Kooten said the complainant was "very likely a student" in Robinson's class. Also, the complaint was not initially submitted to the student reporting system intended for "intellectual diversity" concerns. Instead, it was sent to an informal remediating body, which cannot investigate or discipline, and the university escalated the complaint to the Office of Civil Rights Compliance, which can. "It was surprising that the dean felt that a reporting mechanism that says there's no investigations can just be passed off to someone else, namely him, to conduct the investigation," Robinson said. In the letter, Van Kooten said the complaint submission was "somewhat unusual," but it would be "irresponsible" for the university to ignore the report. In the disciplinary letter, Van Kooten appeared to be concerned with the complaint's claim that Robinson frequently mentioned university criticisms and his personal experiences. He acknowledged that Robinson's class "addresses matters such as free speech, education, authority, state violence, and genocide" in the curriculum. "However, referencing these experiences 'several' or 'numerous' times risks shifting the focus away from the academic content and toward personal political narratives," Van Kooten writes. "When such references become excessive, they may inadvertently allow personal ideology to overshadow the intended learning objectives and compromise the neutrality expected in the classroom." The sanction does not result in immediate punishment. However, the written warning was added to Robinson's permanent personnel file, meaning it will be considered in future faculty reviews. Additional sanctions could subject Robinson to probation, suspension, termination or a host of possible penalties related to promotions, tenure or salary, according to IU code. When the bill was passed in 2024, faculty across the state rebuked it as an infringement on academic freedom and warned of a mass chilling effect on free speech and lecturing on divisive topics. News of his sanction is "utterly, utterly chilling" of his and his colleague's academic freedom and free speech rights, Robinson said, especially during a time when faculty may feel compelled to speak out. He specifically cited genocide in the Israel-Gaza conflict and state-mandated degree cuts at state universities. Receiving another sanction would put his livelihood at risk, Robinson said, and he has lost sleep figuring out how to navigate the process. He said that though he is in a vulnerable position, he hopes to continue to drive conversation about these policies and laws. "The urgency of not caving, the urgency of sticking to one's rights is even greater, because the consequences go well beyond the individual," he said. The USA TODAY Network - Indiana's coverage of First Amendment issues is funded through a collaboration between the Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners.
Los Angeles Times
20 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
L.A. jazz legend Bobby Bradford lost his Altadena home to wildfire. At 91, music is ‘all I have left'
Fifty years ago, L.A. free-jazz titan Bobby Bradford moved into a rambling, verdant house in Altadena. The cornet and trumpet virtuoso, who performed in Ornette Coleman's band and taught jazz history at Pomona College and Pasadena City College for decades, chose the neighborhood partly because it was bustling with artists. He finally had enough bedrooms for his young family to thrive in a bucolic corner of the city with deep Black roots. In January, Bradford's house burned down in the Eaton fire, alongside thousands of others in his cherished Altadena. At 91, he never imagined starting his life over again in tiny rented apartments, with decades of memories in cinders. Despite it all, he's still playing music. (He said that while he did not receive grants from major organizations such as MusiCares or Sweet Relief, a GoFundMe and others efforts by fellow musicians helped him replace his cherished horn.) At the Hammer Museum on Thursday, he'll revisit 'Stealin' Home,' a 2019 suite of original compositions inspired by his lifelong hero — the baseball legend and Dodgers' color-line-breaker Jackie Robinson, a man who knew about persevering through sudden, unrelenting adversity. 'That's all I have left,' Bradford said, pulling his horn out of its case to practice for the afternoon. 'I'm [91] years old. I don't have years to wait around to rebuild.' For now, Bradford lives a small back house on a quiet Pasadena residential street. It's his and his wife's fifth temporary residence since the Eaton fire, and they've done their best to make it a home. Bradford hung up vintage posters from old European jazz festivals and corralled enough equipment together to peaceably write music in the garage. Still, he misses his home in Altadena — both the physical neighborhood where he'd run into friends at the post office and the dream of Altadena, where working artists and multigenerational families could live next to nature at the edge of Los Angeles. 'We knew who all the musicians were. Even if we didn't spent much time all together, it did feel like one big community,' Bradford said. 'We knew players for the L.A. Phil, painters, dancers.' These days, there's a weariness in his eyes and gait, understandable after such a profound disruption in the twilight of his life. He's grateful that smaller local institutions have stepped up to provide places for him to practice his craft, even as insurance companies dragged him through a morass. 'The company said they won't insure me again because because I filed a claim on my house,' he said, bewildered. 'How is that my fault?' But he draws resilience from his recent music, which evokes the gigantic accomplishments and withering abuse Robinson faced as the first Black player in Major League Baseball. As a child in 1947, Bradford remembers listening to the moment Robinson took the field, and while he has always admired the feat, his understanding of Robinson has evolved with age. 'It was such a revelation to me as a kid, but later I was more interested in who the person was that would agree to be the sacrificial lamb,' Bradford said. 'How do you turn that into flesh-and-blood music? I began to think about him being called up, with a kind of call-and-response in the music.' The challenge Bradford gave himself — evoking Robinson's grace on the field and fears off it — caps a long career of adapting his art form to reflect and challenge the culture around him. With Coleman's band in the '50s and '60s, and on his own formidable catalog as a bandleader, he helped pioneer free jazz, a style that subverted the studied cool of bebop with blasts of atonality and mercurial song structures. He played on Coleman's 1972 LP 'Science Fiction,' alongside Indian vocalist Asha Puthli. 'Ornette played with so much raw feeling,' Bradford said. 'He showed me how the same note could be completely different if you played it in a different chord. I had to learn that to play his songs.' His longstanding collaboration with clarinetist John Carter set the template for post-bop in L.A., charged with possibility but lyrical and yearning. He's equally proud of his decades in academia, introducing young students to centuries of the Black American music that culminated in jazz, and the new ways of being that emerged from it. At both Pomona College and Pasadena City College (where Robinson attended and honed his athletic prowess), Bradford helped his students inhabit the double consciousness required of Black artists to survive, invent and advance their art forms in America — from slavery's field songs to Southern sacred music, to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and into the wilds of modernity. 'You always had that one kid who thinks he knows more about this than I do,' he said with a laugh. 'But then you make him understand that to get to this new Black identity, you have to understand what Louis Armstrong had to overcome, how he had to perform in certain ways in front of white people, so he could create this music.' He's been rehearsing with a mix of older and younger local musicians at Healing Force of the Universe, a beloved Pasadena record store and venue that reminds him of the makeshift jazz club he owned near Pasadena's Ice House in the '70s. Places like that are on edge in L.A. these days. Local clubs such as ETA and the Blue Whale (where Bradford recorded a live album in 2018) have closed or faced hard times postpandemic. Others, like the new Blue Note in Hollywood, have big aspirations. He's hopeful L.A. jazz — ever an improvisational art form — will survive and thrive even after the loss of a neighborhood like Altadena displaced so many artists. 'I remember someone coming into our club in the '70s and saying he hated the music we were playing. I asked him what he didn't like about it, and he said, 'Well, everything.' I told him, 'Maybe this isn't the place for you then,'' Bradford laughed. 'You can't live in Los Angeles without that spirit. There are always going to be new places to play.' He's worried about the country, though, as many once-settled questions about who belongs in America are called into doubt under the current president. January's wildfires proved to him, very intimately, that the most fixed points in one's life and community are vulnerable. Even Jackie Robinson, whose feats seemed an indisputable point of pride for all Americans, had his military career temporarily scrubbed from government websites in a recent purge against allegedly 'woke' history. 'I thought we had rowed ourselves across the River Jordan,' Bradford said, shaking his head. 'But now we're back on the other side again. We thought we had arrived.' Who knows how many years of performing Bradford has left. But as the sound of his melancholy horn arced through a sweltering Pasadena afternoon, one couldn't help but be grateful to still have him here playing, even after losing everything. 'You know, in his first game, in three times at bat, Jackie Robinson didn't get a hit,' he said. 'Folks said, 'Oh, it's so sad. We told you he couldn't play on a professional level.' But when you dig into it, you discover that he didn't get a hit at the game, but he laid down a sacrifice to score the winning run.'
New York Post
20 hours ago
- New York Post
Legendary WWE referee Charles Robinson hospitalized after being bitten by a bat
Charles Robinson has spent all these years as a wrestling referee worrying about a bat being used as a weapon, but it would be the flying creature that actually got him. The legendary ex-WCW and current WWE referee revealed Wednesday morning that a bat bit him and he landed in the hospital. 'Great way to start the morning. 2:00am and got bit by a bat,' Robinson wrote in an Instagram post featuring a photo of him in a hospital bed and a video of him receiving medicine. 'That's right a bat! 4 hours later in the ER and six shots. #animalattacks #hospital.' 4 Charles Robinson in a hospital bed. @wwerobinson/Instagram 4 Robinson receiving an injection. @wwerobinson/Instagram Robinson, 61, appeared to be taking it in all in stride. The photo he posted of himself in the hospital bed featured him in a silly pose with his tongue out, while he also posted a photo of the bat with the all-caps caption: 'BAD BAT!!!' 'This is the culprit that got me. Such a cutie! #bat #animal,' Robinson wrote with the photo, which showed the bat's's fangs. 4 The bat that bit Robinson. @wwerobinson/Instagram This scare followed Robinson suffering a cracked rib while refereeing the main event of a July 'Saturday Night's Main Event' between Goldberg and then-world heavyweight champion Gunther. Goldberg accidentally — in storyline — speared Robinson during the match, and Robinson posted an X-ray showing the cracked rib. 'Thanks @goldberg95! Never fear…I am ALL MAN and I can't be kept down!' Robinson wrote. 'I will return for @wwe #smackdown next week in #SanAntonio! #wrestling #nofear Robinson made his name in WCW in the late '90s and early 2000s, especially during his run as Ric Flair's chosen referee, going by the nickname Lil' Naitch. He eventually moved to WWE — then known as WWF — after it purchased WCW, and he now works for the 'Smackdown' brand. 4 Charles Robinson holds a bat alongside Randy Orton. @wwerobinson/Instagram Wrestling content creator Chris Van Vliet reported earlier this year that Robinson became the first WWE referee to call matches across four decades.
