NEW YORK — Rapper Nicki Minaj’s husband tried and failed to get his name off the state’s sex offender registry, Brooklyn Federal court papers show.
Kenneth Petty, who was convicted of attempted rape in 1995 for a sex attack on a 16-year-old girl a year earlier, tried to argue in a Brooklyn Federal Court lawsuit that he never got the chance to contest his status as a medium risk sex offender.
Petty, 47, his lawyer, Alan Gerson, contended that he was never notified about a 2004 hearing to challenge that status and that someone forged his signature on a document about the proceeding. Plus, he claimed he couldn’t have possibly been told about the hearing because he was in state prison.
There was one big problem, though — a court transcript showed that Petty was not only present at the hearing he said he didn’t know about, but that he also didn’t object to being listed as a level 2 sex offender.
On Thursday, though, Petty asked Judge Eric Komitee to have his lawsuit withdrawn — after the state Attorney General’s office included a copy of the transcript in a court filing.
“We’re not going to contest it,” Petty’s lawyer at the time, Jennifer Michaelson, said in the Dec. 14, 2004 hearing in Queens Supreme Court. “I have spoken to the defendant and I’ve explained to him what’s happening here and he is satisfied with the Level 2.”
A search of public records shows that Petty wasn’t locked up again in state prison until 2006, after his manslaughter conviction in a 2002 homicide. His legal team now says he was being held on Rikers Island.
Gerson, who filed the suit, told the Daily News he expects the case will be formally withdrawn “in the next week or two.”
Israel Dov, a paralegal at Gerson’s firm who worked closely with Petty, said Petty was young and likely confused about whether or not he was at the hearing, and what it was about.
“We were just going according to his statement, what he’s telling us, that he wasn’t present,” Dov said. “He still says that he wasn’t there and maybe someone is putting this together just to get him. I don’t think that he purposely lied to us. I just believe maybe he forgot.”
In 2018, Minaj addressed the attempted rape conviction and defended Petty in an Instagram post, writing, “He was 15, she was 16 … in a relationship. But go awf Internet.”
The “Beez in the Trap” performer announced in 2019 that she and Petty were married.
Last year, Petty was sentenced to three years probation after after failing to register as a sex offender when the couple moved to California.
The victim in the case, Jennifer Hough, told “The Real” in 2021 that she was waiting at a bus stop when Petty shoved an object against her back that she thought was a gun and directed her into a nearby house where he raped her.
“He said I knew what he wanted,” Hough said. “He pushed me down on the bed, we wrestled for my clothes.”
After he was done, she said, “He stood in the mirror and he beat his chest and he said, ‘I’m the man. I’m the man.’”
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