Say that everything that Kesha alleges about the producer Dr. Luke raping and abusing her is true. She still loses her lawsuit against him.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. In the ruling where the New York judge Shirley Werner Kornreich dismissed all of Kesha’s claims against the man born Lukasz Gottwald, his affiliated companies, and Sony Music Entertainment, the veracity of Kesha’s allegations were taken as a given. “On a motion to dismiss, the court must accept as true the facts alleged in the complaint, as well as all reasonable inferences that may be gleaned from those facts,” Kornreich explained.
Anyone who has read the vivid and unsettling complaint Kesha filed in October 2014 may find this outcome jarring. Kesha said that after Gottwald brought her into the music industry at a young age, he plied her with substances and then forced himself on her. It mentioned harsh insults about her body and her worthiness as a human. It said that he threatened to hurt her and her family. And it asked that the court see all of this and release her from her contract with him.
Why didn’t it work? The biggest thing seems to be statutes of limitations. “While Kesha’s [claim] alleges that she was sexually, physically and verbally abused by Gottwald for a decade, she describes only two specific instances of physical/sexual abuse,” Kornreich wrote. Those instances: In 2005, she says he forced her to snort drugs and get drunk before boarding an airplane where he made advances on her; in 2008, she says he gave her “sober pills” that turned out to be GHB, enabling what she believes was the rape of her unconscious body.