Was Taylor Swift the female celebrity witness or the accuser named in a lawsuit that said Sean "Diddy" Combs had raped a 13-year-old girl? No, that's not true: Taylor Swift is not named in the lawsuit, filed on October 20, 2024. A male and a female identified in the lawsuit only as Celebrity A and Celebrity B were said to be in the room during the incident on September 7, 2000. In September 2000 Taylor Swift was only 10 and was not yet a celebrity.
The implication, which couples details from a real lawsuit with an AI-generated image, appeared in a post (archived here) on X on October 21, 2024, with this caption:
'Celebrity A' held the 13-year-old girl down and r*ped her while Combs and 'Celebrity B,' a female, watched.
Source: Allegations in New Lawsuit ⚠️
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Oct 22 14:57:49 2024 UTC)
The image with the post appears to show Combs and Swift embracing on a bed. This image is not real. TrueMedia, a nonprofit AI detection tool aggregator, determined that there was substantial evidence of manipulation (pictured below). The full report here shows that an AI Image Generator Analysis found with 96 percent confidence that the image had been made with the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion.
(Source: TrueMedia.org screenshot taken on Tue Oct 22 19:16:26 2024 UTC)
The fake image of Combs and Swift suggests the pop icon is part of a lawsuit that does not name her. This lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York by The Buzbee Law Firm on October 20, 2024. Case 1:24-cv-07975, lists the plaintiff, Jane Doe, and 11 defendants, starting with Combs and continuing with businesses he operated including record labels and a recording studio.
Page 14 of the filing describes what it says was the rape of the then-13-year-old accuser by Combs and another man called "Celebrity A" on the night of September 7, 2000, when the MTV Video Music Awards were held in New York City. It says a female, "Celebrity B," was also present in the bedroom and watched the rapes occur.
It is unclear if this post aims to suggest that Swift is the plaintiff who was then 13, or "Celebrity B," but the fact of Swift's age at the time rules out either possibility. Born on December 13, 1989, Swift was 10 years old at the time.
Combs was arrested on September 16, 2024 (archived here), in New York City on charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation for purposes of prostitution. He pleaded not guilty.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks on claims pertaining to Sean Combs can be found here.
