Cuba Gooding Jr. Accused of Sexual Assault in Diddy Suit

By Tariro Mzezewa, the Cut's morning blogger.   Her coverage areas include culture, politics and art. She also contributes to Vulture, The New York Times and Conde Nast Traveler. She previously worked as a national correspondent at The New York Times.

Cuba Gooding Jr. has been accused of sexual assault again, this time by producer Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones Jr., who filed a lawsuit in February accusing Sean “Diddy” Combs of sexually harassing, drugging, and threatening him between 2022 and 2023. Gooding’s name came up in the original suit, but on Monday, the filing was amended to list him as a defendant, according to People. The Miami Herald reports that the suit was amended hours after Homeland Security raided Combs’s Miami and Los Angeles homes.

Jones says he believes that in addition to harassing and drugging him, Diddy was “grooming him to pass him off to his friends.” Jones claims that Combs introduced him to Gooding in January 2023, while the men were on Combs’s yacht in the Virgin Islands, and “suggested that Cuba ‘get to know’” him better. Jones alleges that after the introduction, Gooding sexually harassed and assaulted him. “Cuba Gooding Jr. began touching, groping, and fondling Mr. Jones’ legs, his upper inner thighs near his groin, the small of his back near his buttocks and his shoulders,” the complaint says. Feeling “extremely uncomfortable,” Jones says he leaned away and “rejected his advances” but claims Gooding “did not stop until Mr. Jones forcibly pushed him away.”

In his suit, Jones accused Combs of operating a “sex-trafficking venture” and “engaging in serious illegal activity,” including “providing laced alcoholic beverages to minors and sex workers at his homes.” Jones said that he lived and traveled with Combs while working on the rapper’s 2023 album. During that time, he said he was “the victim of constant unsolicited and unauthorized groping and touching of his anus by Mr. Combs.” Jones also recalled waking up naked, dizzy, and confused in bed with Combs and two sex workers, and believes that Combs had drugged him. A source told NBC News the raids of Combs’s homes — which his attorney called a “gross overuse of military-level force” — were related to an investigation regarding allegations of sex trafficking, sexual assault, and the solicitation and distribution of illegal narcotics and firearms.

This isn’t the first time Gooding has been accused of sexual assault. In 2022, he pleaded guilty to one count of forcibly touching a woman in 2018. A year later, he settled a lawsuit in which a woman accused him of raping her twice in 2013. In November, the same two women brought a civil suit against him.

Meanwhile, Shawn Holley, an attorney for Combs, has denied Jones’s allegations against her client, telling the Cut in an email in February that Jones was “nothing more than a liar who filed a $30 million lawsuit shamelessly looking for an undeserved payday. His reckless name-dropping about events that are pure fiction and simply did not happen is nothing more than a transparent attempt to garner headlines.”

We’ve reached out to an attorney for Gooding for comment on the latest allegations and will update if we hear back.