Bob Dylan 1965 Sexual Abuse Case Dismissed

Updated:

January 18, 2024 9:19 am

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The woman who accused Bob Dylan in 2021 of allegedly grooming and sexually abusing her in 1965 when she was 12 years old, has dropped her case on July 28, according to a report.

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“This case is over,” said Dylan’s lawyer Orin Snyder in a statement. “It is outrageous that it was ever brought in the first place. We are pleased that the plaintiff has dropped this lawyer-driven sham and that the case has been dismissed with prejudice.”

Identified only as JC, the woman failed to hand over emails and text messages by a deadline set by the court and accused Dylan’s lawyers of destroying evidence. The accuser recently discharged her legal representatives in the case as well.

Though Dylan, 81, has not commented on the recent outcome of the case, he initially denied the allegations that were filed in New York State Supreme Court on Aug. 13, 2021.

The original lawsuit claimed that the musician plied the girl with alcohol and drugs and sexually abused her over a six-week period at his Chelsea Hotel room in Manhattan between April and May 1965. Now 69, the accuser claimed she was 12 years old at the time when Dylan would have been 23 or 24 years old, and that the musician “exploited his status as a musician by grooming JC to gain her trust and to obtain control over her as part of his plan to sexually molest and abuse JC.”

She further claimed that Dylan attempted to “lower her inhibitions with the object of sexually abusing her, which he did with the provision of drugs, alcohol, and threats of physical violence, leaving her emotionally scarred and psychologically damaged to this day.”

When Dylan’s lawyers responded that the timeframe of the claim was a “chronological impossibility” since the artist was in the U.K. on his Don’t Look Back Tour from late April through at least May 10 of that year and could not have been in New York City, the woman amended the dates of the incident as occurring “several months in the spring of 1965.”

Dylan recently revealed his first UK tour in more than five years and is set to release a new music essay, “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” on Nov. 8.

(Photo by PL Gould/IMAGES/Getty Images)