Kevin Hart has been sued for breaching a contract with his former friend Jonathan Jackson relating to an alleged extortion attempt involving a sex tape.
In 2017, Hart posted on social media that he had made a “bad error in judgement”, which led to an undisclosed individual making an extortion attempt against him.
A year later, the comedian spoke of his “shock” and “hurt” after his friend Jonathan Jackson was arrested for extortion charges in relation to a sex tape. Jackson had allegedly attempted to blackmail Hart, supposedly threatening to release a video he secretly recorded of the star having sex with a woman in Las Vegas. Jackson denied the charges, which were eventually dropped.
In 2021, Hart posted a video on Instagram about the whole episode, saying he was happy to be “moving on” from that chapter in his life.
However, that post is now the subject of a new $12million (£9.3million) lawsuit, filed by Jackson in Los Angeles. The suit, which has been obtained by Rolling Stone, claims that Hart’s post breached a contract between the two.
The suit argues that Jackson and Hart signed a “meticulously negotiated” settlement three months before the Instagram post, and the contract stipulated that Hart had to use “specific verbiage” that would “publicly exonerate” Jackson. It also reportedly required Hart to note that Jackson had been fully cleared of any involvement in an extortion plot.
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Instead, the suit claims that Hart “blatantly broke” their agreement.
“The wording of Hart’s statement, meticulously negotiated and detailed in the contract, was crucial to repairing and remediating the severe damage inflicted upon plaintiff’s reputation by the baseless extortion allegations that Hart aggressively promoted and publicized,” the lawsuit says.
Hart’s Instagram post “dilutes this intent by framing the exoneration more as a conclusion to a chapter in Hart’s own life rather than a clear and unequivocal exoneration of plaintiff,” it continues.
Hart’s representatives have not responded to requests for comment.
In other Hart news, earlier this year he told critics of Dave Chappelle to simply not watch the comedian if they don’t find his material funny or entertaining.
He also revealed that he “almost died” in a terrifying plane accident, in which the exterior of the aircraft caught fire.
“We were landing and as we did the front wheel broke, and I just saw flames coming out of the front of the plane,” he told Graham Norton.
“It was one of those moments when I thought, ‘This is it’, and I realised that if it happens I was cool with where I was in life. I didn’t panic.”