Ethan Miller/Michael Kovac/Getty Images for City of HopeAnother chapter in this increasingly twisted legal saga.
Dr. Luke's legal team successfully requested to have a previously sealed deposition from 2011 made public, in which Kesha stated that the famed music producer never gave her drugs and that they never had an "intimate relationship"—statements that are contrary to Kesha's more recent characterization of their relationship.
In a lawsuit filed Oct. 14, the platinum-selling pop star accused Dr. Luke of sexual assault and battery and sexual harassment, claiming that he abused her both physically and verbally over the years that they worked together, including, per court documents, one occasion where he slipped her GHB so he could "rape her while she was unconscious."
The celeb producer promptly countersued for defamation, calling the allegations "outrageous and untrue."
Kesha's attorney Mark Geragos tells E! News, in response to the emergence of the deposition that seemingly contradict her current claims, that Dr. Luke's latest legal maneuver is a "Hail Mary" attempt to turn the tables against Kesha.
"Luke's latest legal maneuver comes as no surprise; it's a desperate Hail Mary and a pathetic attempt to once again blame his victim," the lawyer said in a statement. "As detailed in our complaint, Luke walked Kesha down the beach and threatened to destroy Kesha's life and the lives of her family if she didn't cover up his sexual assaults in a 2011 deposition. He is now following through on his threats and grasping at straws to try and twist Kesha's equivocal statements.
"Unfortunately protecting abusers out of fear happens all too often with battered women. This case is about Luke's physical, emotional and psychological abuse of Kesha and her fight to get him out of her life. After being driven to the brink of death and into rehab, she's no longer going to allow herself to wither away at the hands of her abuser as he tries to blame the victim."
To TMZ, a rep for Kesha called her 2011 statements the result of "Stockholm syndrome," when a victim starts to adopt the mindset of the victimizer, motivated largely by fear.
The deposition in question was taken June 16, 2011, during the course of a lawsuit brought against Kesha and Dr. Luke by Das Communication. The "Tic Toc" singer stated under oath that Dr. Luke never gave her coke or other drugs.
"Dr. Luke never gave me coke," she stated, per a copy of the transcript obtained by E! News. When asked if Dr. Luke ever gave her other drugs that could not be purchased at a pharmacy, Kesha said she didn't know. When specifically asked whether Dr. Luke ever gave her a roofie, aka GHB (as she claimed in her lawsuit this month), she replied, "no." When asked if she ever told her mother that she woke up in a hotel room in Dr. Luke's bed not recalling what happened the night before, Kesha said, "I don't remember." Kesha was also asked during that deposition whether she ever had an intimate relationship with Dr. Luke, and she said "no."
During an Oct. 18, 2011, deposition also pertaining to Das Communication's case, Kesha's mother, Pebe Sebert, also stated that she was not aware of any sexual relationship between Dr. Luke and her daughter. She also stated that she was never told that Dr. Luke had given her daughter drugs at any time.
Dr. Luke's attorney Christine Lepera previously said this month that Sebert threatened last year to go public with sexual abuse allegations if he didn't release Kesha from her contract.
"It is telling that Dr. Luke would twist an email from a horrified and justifiably angry mother threatening to tell the truth—the truth!—about the predator that sexually assaulted her daughter," Geragos said in response to Dr. Luke's accusation of attempted extortion.
Lepera moreover called Kesha's lawsuit "a spectacular and outrageous fiction that will go down in flames."
—Reporting by Claudia Rosenbaum