NEW YORK — A woman who claimed Bob Dylan sexually abused her in 1965 when she was 12 years old dropped her Manhattan Federal Court lawsuit against the musician Thursday amid allegations she destroyed key email evidence in the case.
“This case is over. It is outrageous that it was ever brought in the first place,” said Orin Snyder, who is Dylan’s lead lawyer in the case. He called the suit a “lawyer-driven sham.”
Snyder said Manhattan Federal Judge Katherine Polk Failla dismissed the case “with prejudice,” which brings it to a complete close.
The woman’s lawsuit, filed in August 2021 in Manhattan Supreme Court and later moved to federal court, said Dylan “exploited his status as a musician by grooming [her] to gain her trust and obtain control over her as part of his plan to sexually molest and abuse.
The woman, identified in court papers as J.C., a Greenwich, Connecticut, resident, claimed Dylan gave her drugs and abused her across a weekslong period beginning in April 1965. She said the abuse left her “emotionally scarred and psychologically damaged to this day.”
Dylan’s attorneys fought the suit from the start, calling it a “brazen shakedown.”
In a letter to the court, Dylan’s legal team said J.C. destroyed emails she wrote in 2021 “discussing— and casting doubt on — the key factual allegations she has made in this lawsuit.”
The emails “directly question inconsistencies and impossibilities in [J.C.’s] allegations, and [J.C.] responds point-by-point in reply emails, which themselves are both internally inconsistent and inconsistent with material allegations in this case.”
The case fell apart in recent weeks as Dylan’s defense team claimed in court documents that the woman “destroyed evidence directly relevant to the central factual allegations in this litigation, and that the evidence may be lost forever.”
The woman’s attorneys requested to withdraw from the case on July 19, according to Law360. Upon request for comment, one of the woman’s lawyers, Daniel Isaacs told the Daily News, “I have no comment other than what’s in the court records.”
If the case had continued, the woman and her attorneys could have faced fines and sanctions from the court for failing to produce the missing evidence.
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