Another woman has joined the victims accusing rapper T.I. and his wife Tiny Harris of sexual assault, abuse, and drugging. Lawyer Tyrone A. Blackburn told Vulture he is now representing “a survivor who was drugged and trafficked by [T.I. and Tiny] in Nevada, California, and Florida over three days.” Blackburn previously sent letters to offices in California and Georgia calling for criminal investigations into T.I. (born Clifford Harris) and Tiny (born Tameka Cottle) on behalf of 11 initial victims. Since sending those letters, Blackburn has now spoken to six new victims, he said in an interview with the Daily Beast published March 9; only one of those victims, the new trafficking accuser, retained Blackburn, his representative confirmed to Vulture. “All she wants is justice, and we intend to fight until she gets it,” Blackburn added in an email. A lawyer for T.I. and Tiny told Vulture his clients “continue to deny in the strongest possible terms these scurrilous and unsubstantiated accusations.”
Blackburn sent the letters in Georgia and California on February 19, before speaking to the New York Times about his clients’ allegations on February 28. In the letters, Blackburn described “eerily similar events of sexual abuse, forced ingestion of illegal narcotics, kidnapping, terroristic threats, and false imprisonment,” with victims including a 17-year-old intern to T.I. and Tiny’s studio and an Air Force veteran. T.I. and Tiny denied the allegations through their lawyer at the time, who called them “unsubstantiated and baseless.” Blackburn told the Beast he has had conversations with two offices about his clients’ allegations. “If I was a prosecutor, I’d have brought charges already,” he said.
The new victim marks the first time Blackburn has accused T.I. and Tiny of “trafficking,” and also expands their allegations into Nevada, after his letters previously referenced Florida along with Georgia and California. In the email to Vulture, Blackburn called the Harrises “a cancer in the community,” going on to say, “it is high time that law enforcement puts an end to their reign of terror.”
Steve Sadow, the lawyer for T.I. and Tiny, repeated his previous statement that the claims would not manifest into charges upon being investigated. “We await Blackburn exposing his anonymous accusers to the light of day, by revealing their names, so we will be in a position to confront their allegations,” Sadow told Vulture. “By Blackburn choosing instead to misuse the media for his own publicity and hiding the identities of his clients from the public and us, he makes it impossible for us to do so now.”
In addition to the victims represented by Blackburn, dozens of victims began to accuse T.I. and Tiny of sexual assault, abuse, and drugging in late January on Instagram. Sabrina Peterson collected those allegations on her Instagram after she first accused T.I. of once holding her at gunpoint. Peterson, also co-represented by Blackburn, has brought a defamation suit against T.I. and Tiny over their denials of her claims; through a separate lawyer, T.I. and Tiny also denied making any defamatory statements.
