Music exec Antonio “L.A.” Reid has reached a settlement with former Arista A&R Drew Dixon to end her sexual harassment and assault lawsuit against him, averting a jury trial that had been set to start on Monday (Jan. 12).
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Dixon’s 2023 lawsuit alleged that Reid — who headed up LaFace, Arista, Island Def Jam and Epic over the course of a storied career — sexually harassed her repeatedly and then forcibly kissed and groped her twice in 2001. He has strongly denied the allegations.
A trial had been scheduled to start this week in New York federal court, with stars like John Legend set to testify. But on Monday morning, those proceedings never started — and in a statement later that morning, Dixon’s lawyers announced that a settlement had been reached to avoid the showdown.
“Drew Dixon is an extraordinarily talented music executive, and this resolution will empower her to move forward with her creative pursuits — on her own terms — with her reputation, her voice and her career reaffirmed,” said Kenya Davis, Dixon’s lead attorney at the firm Boies Schiller Flexner. In the same statement, Dixon herself said, “In a world where good news is often hard to find, I hope for survivors that today is a ray of light peeking through the clouds.”
When reached by Billboard, Reid’s attorney, Imran H. Ansari, confirmed the settlement and said, “Mr. Reid has amicably resolved this matter with Ms. Dixon without any admission of liability.”
Terms of the settlement agreement were not publicly disclosed in court filings, including whether any money would be paid as part of the deal. Both sides declined to offer more details.
For years one of the music industry’s top executives, Reid left Epic in 2017 amid allegations of sexual harassment from a female assistant. In 2023, Dixon added new accusations against him, claiming he had harassed and sexually assaulted her while she worked under him at Arista, and then had essentially scuttled her career after she rebuffed the advances.
In her suit, Dixon detailed an alleged 2001 incident in which Reid sat next to her on a private plane and “digitally penetrated her vulva without her consent.” During a car ride months later, she said Reid “began to grope and kiss” her and then again sexually assaulted her in the same manner.
She also claimed Reid retaliated after she pushed back — including by interfering with her efforts to sign then-little-known artists Legend and Kanye West. After allegedly bringing in West for an audition, she claimed Reid passed on the rapper “and then proceeded to berate Ms. Dixon in front of the whole A&R department about how bad she was at her job and what a waste of his time the audition had been, all while Kanye waited in the lobby.”
Dixon says she left Arista in 2002 because she believed Reid would “continue to stifle her career.” In the years since, she says she has been “essentially blackballed because she has spoken out.”
In court filings, Reid said he “adamantly denies the allegations,” arguing that they were disproven by “repeated admissions Dixon has made in prior writings and interviews exculpating Reid of any physical misconduct.” He also argued that the case should be dismissed under the statute of limitations, but those efforts were denied by the judge.
Ahead of the planned trial, Reid had struggled to field a legal team. He was previously represented by powerhouse entertainment lawyer Shawn Holley, but her firm withdrew from the case after he fell behind on legal bills. He briefly faced the prospect of going to trial without any lawyers at all, but later retained Ansari and other lawyers from the firm Aidala Bertuna & Kamins.
Dixon has also leveled abuse allegations against Russell Simmons, who founded Def Jam Recordings in 1984 and later built a formidable hip-hop empire. She and two other women accused him of rape in a wide-ranging 2017 article by the New York Times, then she did so again as part of a 2020 documentary film that featured interviews with numerous alleged victims. She later also sued him for libel, claiming he had defamed her by suggesting during an interview that she was lying about the incident.
