The assault case against Remy Ma was thrown out on Monday. Manhattan prosecutors had asked for the judge to dismiss the misdemeanor charges that alleged that she hit her Love & Hip Hop: New York co-star Brittney Taylor — explaining that “we cannot prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The judge agreed to dismiss and seal her case following a brief court proceeding.
“I’m happy I don’t have to come down here anymore,” commented Ma, whose legal surname is Smith, after the dismissal.
She then joked with the reporters and photographers who had followed every development of her legal drama, saying, “I’m gonna miss you guys.”
The glamorous performer, whose yellow-and-pink fur coat gave her a bright aura in the dim courthouse, was upbeat as she left the courthouse.
Onlookers were quick to tell Smith they loved her and compliment her appearance.
One woman scrambled to leave the security line, moving away from the metal detectors to try to snap a photo of Ma.
Outside, a woman shouted from a car, “You look so beautiful!”
Smith was arrested in May. Prosecutors had claimed that she whacked Taylor “in the face with a closed fist, causing bruising and swelling to her right eye” at an Irving Plaza cancer benefit concert on April 16.
Smith denied the allegations from the get-go, and Taylor had her own legal troubles this summer.
Taylor was accused of scratching the neck of Dina Khalil, who was a witness in the purported nightclub incident, according to the New York Post. Taylor ultimately accepted a dismissal deal; under this agreement, the clawing-related misdemeanor charges would get tossed if she stayed out of trouble.
In requesting a dismissal of Smith’s case, Assistant District Attorney Juan Maldonado said that “after a thorough, monthslong investigation, the people are moving to dismiss this case … as we cannot prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Prosecutors spoke with “numerous witnesses,” including people affiliated with Smith, Taylor, and “an unaffiliated, impartial eyewitness,” he said.
“This unaffiliated witness remembers seeing the defendant the entire time the defendant was in the greenroom at Irving Plaza, where the assault purportedly occurred,” Maldonado said. “This eyewitness never saw the defendant and the complainant interact in the time she observed the defendant.”
And the eyewitness who was going to back Taylor “is no longer cooperative,” Maldonado said, adding that there isn’t surveillance video inside the venue’s greenroom.
“For these reasons the people are moving to dismiss, as we cannot prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said.
Asked for comment, Taylor’s lawyer, Sanford Rubenstein, said, “I have no comment until after I meet with my client with regard to this recent development.”
“I wish they would have come to that conclusion before I had an ankle bracelet and lost months and months of wages and had a curfew … and before I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a lawyer,” Smith said outside the courthouse.
