Nicki Minaj and her husband, Kenneth Petty scored a small win during their ongoing legal battle with Jennifer Hough.
Hough’s attorney requested a $20 million default judgment for the rapper’s failure to respond to her harassment lawsuit, but a federal clerk for the Eastern District of New York determined that Minaj didn’t fail to respond.
The clerk found the rapper hired a lawyer last week to defend her but Petty did “not file an answer or otherwise moved with respect to the complaint.”
The Queen rapper cites her delayed response as an “innocent mistake.”
“My failure to respond to the complaint was the product of an innocent mistake, and I ask the court to excuse the delay so that I can defend what I believe to be an entirely frivolous case,” Minaj explained in her statement.
“I confirm the truth of those portions of [the] defendant’s declaration concerning my role in her failure to secure my services promptly,” attorney Judd Burstein, who is defending Nicki in the harassment case wrote in a related statement.
Hough’s attorney, Tyrone Blackburn, insisted that they’ll continue moving forward with the $20 million default judgment. He told Rolling Stone, “It’s interesting that Kenneth Petty is currently in the Eastern District of New York suing the state of New York, but he has no respect for this proceeding and no respect for this judge to come forward and to answer for raping Jennifer Hough in 1994 and all the harassment he and his wife and his goons visited upon her since then.”
