Diplo Could Face Sexual Misconduct Charges: Report

Celebrity DJ Diplo is potentially facing charges of invasion of privacy and intentionally giving someone a sexually transmitted infection, a year after a former partner accused him of sexual misconduct.

The Los Angeles city attorney’s office confirmed to BuzzFeed News that it was considering criminal misdemeanor charges against the musician, real name Thomas Wesley Pentz.

The allegations stem from a complaint made with the LAPD in Oct. 2020 by a 25-year-old woman who accused the 42-year-old of recording sexually explicit videos of her without her consent and sharing at least one video without her permission. The woman, who The Daily Beast is not naming, claims that Pentz knowingly gave her chlamydia.

She also alleges that Pentz raped her in a Las Vegas hotel room in July 2019. Local police declined to file charges regarding that allegation, according to BuzzFeed News.

The Daily Beast reached out to Pentz’s team for comment. He has previously denied the allegations.

The woman claimed that she first met Pentz through Twitter when she was 17, with the EDM artist allegedly reaching out to her privately in her DMs. Eventually, the pair met in person. In March 2018, when she was 21 years old, she had consensual sex with him.

She claims in court papers that shortly after the Las Vegas encounter in 2019, she tested positive for chlamydia, alleging it was Pentz who had transmitted the STI to her, explaining he was her first and only sexual partner at the time.

According to the woman’s social media pages, the pair communicated regularly over text and Snapchat, and she has posted videos of the two in the same room together. Pentz’s team does not deny their relationship, although they painted it as being a brief romantic fling.

At some point, the relationship deteriorated, and in October 2020 the woman came forward in a series of tweets that accused Pentz of grooming her and alleging he had hired a private investigator to “scare” her out of speaking out about “the disgusting details” she could reveal about him.

“I SPECIFICALLY asked him not too & his reply was ‘fuck it. I’m recording this,’” she wrote in a Twitter thread about Pentz allegedly filming a sexual video of her despite her protests.

“I never had the will or intention to expose Diplo being that I did not want all the years I invested into speaking & hanging out with him to go in vain…. or end nasty. But I slowly started to realize he is a huge manipulating liar / gaslighter who PREYS young women of ALL races (to be honest) but primarily young naive women of color.”

Days after the Twitter thread was published, the woman claimed a nude photo that she had only sent to Pentz was posted online, which led her to file a restraining order against him in November, accusing the musician of distributing revenge porn.

The judge granted the woman a temporary restraining order against Pentz, but also granted Pentz one against the woman, following his accusations that she also posted a nude photo of him online. Although both of their restraining orders were dismissed, the woman indicated online they had tried to settle privately and failed.

By April, they were back in court, with Pentz seeking monetary damages and the woman firing back with her own civil suit in June, accusing the DJ of “target[ing] very young Black women and girls for sexual assault.”

This is not the first time Pentz has been accused of having questionable relationships with young Black and brown women.

The same month the woman accused Pentz of grooming her on Twitter, he was criticized for allowing then-19-year-old TikTok star and aspiring musician ​​Quenlin Blackwell to live at his Los Angeles mansion. She insisted their relationship was purely platonic, calling him her “L.A. dad” while Pentz defended himself, explaining the two had worked on music together. Blackwell moved out the following month.

Also in Oct. 2020, 30-year-old rapper Azealia Banks claimed on her podcast that Pentz had discovered her on Myspace and credited him with launching her music career. But, she said, “I used to have sex with Diplo when I was 17….yeah, I had to give him some teenage pussy to do it. He’s always been preying on young ethnic girls.”