L.A. Reid Accuser Says He Kept Her From Signing Kanye West
L.A. Reid Accuser Says He Kept Her From Signing Kanye West & John Legend
Former music executive Dru Dixon has won a pre-trial motion in her upcoming lawsuit against her former boss, L.A Reid. She’s suing him for allegedly derailing her career at Arista Records after she says she turned down his sexual advances.
Reid’s lawyers argued that those specific accusations should be eliminated from the lawsuit due to the statute of limitations. But Judge Jeannette A. Vargas ruled last Thursday that Dixon can argue those lost commissions in her case due to New York’s Adult Survivors Act (ASA).
Dixon, 55, filed the lawsuit in 2023 in Federal District Court in New York, alleging that Reid, 69, assaulted and sexually harassed her. When she refused him, he retaliated by blocking opportunities that would have advanced her career. Signing West and Legend could have brought her six and seven-figure commissions. Per Dixon’s lawsuit, Reid said a meeting with West was a “waste of his time” and refused to meet with Legend at all.
She inherited Reid as a boss when industry legend Clive Davis left the label in 2000. She’d worked her way up to Vice President of A&R under Davis, but when Reid replaced him, Dixon says that’s when the problems began. She also worked with rap mogul Russell Simmons at Def Jam and alleges he raped her in 1995. Dixon says that both of these executives, who have been accused of sexual harassment and assault by other women, kept her from having the success in the music industry she worked for.
Dixon left Arista Records in 2002.
In 2017, Reid was forced out of his role as CEO of Epic Records when a female assistant he’d worked with accused him of sexual harassment. Simmons has lived mostly out of the country in Bali for the last several years, after a series of accusations leveled against him. He has maintained that all of his sexual relationships were consensual.
“L.A. Reid is a known predator who uses his singular professional power to force himself on his victims,” Dixon said when she first filed the lawsuit in 2023. “In my case, his persistent campaign of sexual harassment and assault forced me to abandon the work I loved when I was at the top of my game in the music business, having worked my way up from internships and a job as a receptionist.”
Reid’s trial is scheduled to start on Sept. 8, but there is some doubt if it will happen then. A lawyer who worked on the case has not yet been paid and is no longer working for Reid.
“This litigation is not only about the horrific physical assaults that Ms. Dixon had to endure, but it is also about the irreparable damage done to the rare and blossoming career of an extraordinary talent,” Dixon’s lawsuit concluded.
