Already facing public allegations from nearly a dozen women of sexually assaulting and drugging them, T.I. is now in the spotlight of the Los Angeles Police Department.
“There is an active investigation into Clifford Harris,” confirmed Officer William Cooper of the LAPD to Deadline today, using T.I.’s real name. The official statement comes after rumors of a cop shop probe against T.I and his wife Tameka “Tiny” Harris began circulating earlier today. The LAPD would not confirm if Tiny Harris was being investigated too.
The investigation has been underway for the past several weeks, I hear. LAPD detectives met with a Jane Doe last month to discuss claims of a drugging and rape by T.I. and Tiny back in 2005. The detectives have been looking into other claims as well, sources tell Deadline.
The 2005 incident saw the anonymous USAF serving woman invited back to the couple’s hotel room after meeting them in a club. Having been offered a drink by T.I. once in the room, the woman told LAPD officials she soon found herself naked and, in a shower, and on a bed with the Harrises, as she felt increasingly sick.
The woman shares a lawyer in Tyrone A. Blackburn with Rachelle Jenks. The latter filed a report with the Las Vegas Police Department in April that details a similar sequence of drinks and rape to the LA incident.
On March 1, Blackburn held a press conference asserting that he represented “eleven individuals, ten women and one man” who have been “victims” of the Harrises over a 15-year timespan. At the time, the Brooklyn-based attorney asserted he and his firm had been contacted by “over thirty women” who allege that the Harrises, “aided by several individuals in their employ, have kidnapped them, drugged them, raped them, and terrorized them with threats of death or physical bodily harm.”
The month before, Blackburn sent a letter to then California Attorney General Xavier Bacerra saying that “of the eleven individuals retained by my office, one of them was a resident of the State of California at the time of her drugging and rape,” Requesting of Bacerra that “investigators and prosecutors from your office” get involved, the correspondence added that “these women are unaware of each other, and without any leading on my part, they recount eerily similar events of sexual abuse, forced ingestion of illegal narcotics, kidnapping, terroristic threats, and false imprisonment.”
Baccera is now leading the Department of Health and Human Services in DC for Joe Biden and Rob Bonta is the Golden State’s top law enforcement official. The letter from Blackburn, as well as efforts by the lawyer to contact various local law enforcement groups individually, seems to have been at least partially responsible for the LAPD looking into matters.
If the cops find enough information to warrant charges in their opinion, the file will be passed over the LA County D.A. George Gascón office. It will then be up to the D.A. and the office’s sex crimes unit to decide if they want to take further action.
Contacted by Deadline, reps for APA client T.I did not respond to request for comment. Tyrone A. Blackburn also did not respond to request for comment on the news of the LAPD probe.
Having appeared in both of the Ant-Man flicks from Marvel/Disney, T.I. has been a judge on Netflix’s Rhythm + Flow and BET’s The Grand Hustle among others projects. Production on the fourth season of MTV reality series T.I. & Tiny: Friends & Family Hustle in Atlanta was shut down in February when the initial allegations were made public.