A Los Angeles judge said today she’s on the brink of ordering the sale of Nicki Minaj’s $20 million Hidden Hills mansion so a security guard can collect on the $500,000 default judgment he won after suing the “Barbie World” rapper and her husband over his alleged backstage assault at a concert in Germany.
“My tentative is to grant this,” Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Cindy Pánuco said at an afternoon hearing. “I just want to make sure we’re getting it right.” She said the only outstanding document in the application to force the home’s sale was a Bank of America statement detailing Minaj’s payments on the $13.3 million mortgage since October 2022 and the daily interest accrual.
“Let’s say there’s no bidder who offers the full $20 million, and it goes up for auction, and they don’t get fair market value, and it doesn’t cover everything,” Pánuco gave as a hypothetical. “If it doesn’t cover what the sale is required to cover — including the judgment, in this instance — then I would use that evidence to help me to determine that.”
The guard’s lawyer, Paul Saso, argued that the sale would almost certainly yield millions more than necessary to cover everything. And if it didn’t, they could deal with that possibility at a later date, he said. But the judge wouldn’t budge, saying she wanted the bank statement first. “As I understand it, that’s the only piece missing. Everything else looked good,” she said. She set a follow-up hearing for Jan. 22 to receive the pending paperwork and enter her ruling.
Plaintiff Thomas Weidenmuller filed his application for the order last month, telling the court he tried to enforce the default judgment through less extreme measures, but Minaj and her husband, Kenneth Petty, have not responded. He says seven “potential garnishees” claimed they did “not have any accounts payable to Minaj or otherwise failed to respond at all.”
The eight-bedroom luxury home has a $13,258,000 mortgage lien, and Minaj, as the sole owner, would be entitled to a $722,151 homestead exemption, the application, obtained by Rolling Stone, said. With the home recently appraised at $20 million, a sale would yield approximately $6 million in funds once the lien and exception are paid, it estimated.
“There is no doubt that the sale of the dwelling would satisfy the entire judgment, with millions to spare,” the application said. “Although it is regrettable that the extraordinary measure of forcing the sale of Minaj’s dwelling is required, that result is entirely the product of her intransigence in not making payment.”
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The application described Minaj as a global music superstar with an estimated net worth of at least $150 million. “There is little doubt that she is highly capable of paying the judgment in full, and yet, she has refused to do so despite multiple written requests for payment and levies served upon several of her suspected creditors,” the filing said.
Weidenmuller sued the couple in January 2022, alleging Petty ambushed him from behind and sucker punched him in the face as retribution for Weidenmuller stepping in to defend a female security guard during a dispute with Minaj during the 2019 concert in Frankfurt.
According to Weidenmuller, Minaj became visibly frustrated and blamed the female guard for allowing a fan to breach a barricade and climb onstage with her. Minaj allegedly started berating the female security guard while recording the exchange. Weidenmuller says he stepped in and told Minaj it wasn’t fair that the guard’s career might be “ruined” on social media. In response, Minaj allegedly threw a shoe at Weidenmuller but missed. Weidenmuller claims Petty later accused him of disrespecting Minaj and punched him in the face, leaving him “stunned and disoriented.”
“I felt a blinding pain in my head, neck, face, and jaw. I could tell in that instant that something was seriously wrong with my jaw,” he wrote in a court filing. He said medics called an ambulance to take him to a hospital. He underwent the first of several surgeries and stayed there for 10 days, he said.
“I now have five plates in my jaw, and my jaw has not yet been fully reconstructed. The doctors must still insert implants into my jaw as a part of the reconstruction process. In the interim, the doctors have inserted donor bones from a deceased person into my mouth in order to preserve space for the future implants,” he wrote in a sworn statement.
Weidenmuller previously asked for around $21,000 to cover medical bills and $700,000 for his ongoing injury and emotional pain and suffering. The judge trimmed it down to $503,318 when she awarded the money Friday under a default judgment because Minaj and Petty never responded to the lawsuit.
Weidenmuller’s lawyers told the court they made repeated attempts to serve Minaj and Petty with the complaint but were never successful. They mailed copies and sent a process server to the couple’s gated community in Calabasas, California, but never made contact. They eventually published the summons in a newspaper.
A rep for Minaj and Petty did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Rolling Stone sent Monday. The couple married in 2019 and welcomed a son a year later. The house they share in Hidden Hills is Minaj’s sole property, according to court documents.
Petty, meanwhile, remains a defendant in a sexual assault lawsuit filed in Brooklyn federal court by Jennifer Hough, the woman at the center of Petty’s 1994 attempted rape conviction.
Hough claims Petty accosted her at a Queens bus stop in September 1994 when they were high school students. She claims he forced her to a nearby residence at knifepoint and raped her. Petty was ultimately convicted of first-degree attempted rape in 1995 and spent four and a half years in prison. Decades later, in January 2020, he was charged with failing to register as a sex offender when he moved to Los Angeles in 2019. He was sentenced to three years of probation and briefly placed on house arrest in 2023 for violating the terms of the probation.
From Rolling Stone US
