Nicki Minaj pays out assault case to avoid forced sale of $20m home

Nicki Minaj has avoided having to sell her $20 million (£14.8 million) Hidden Hills mansion to pay a $500,000 (£370,000) default judgment.

Security guard Thomas Weidenmuller won the sum after suing the Starships rapper and her husband over an alleged assault at a 2019 concert in Frankfurt.

“She has satisfied the judgment,” the guard’s lawyer told Rolling Stone. “It required us going to the one-yard line.”

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Cindy Pánuco was on the brink of entering a decision to sell the home at a hearing on Thursday afternoon.

Weidenmuller filed his original lawsuit in January 2022. He claimed Minaj’s husband, Kenneth Petty, had ambushed him from behind and sucker punched him in the face because he was upset Weidenmuller had stepped in to defend a female security guard during a dispute with Minaj backstage.

“I now have five plates in my jaw, and my jaw has not yet been fully reconstructed,” Weidenmuller explained.

“The doctors must still insert implants into my jaw as a part of the reconstruction process. In the interim, the doctors have inserted donor bones from a deceased person into my mouth in order to preserve space for the future implants,” he wrote in a sworn statement.

He filed his application to enforce payment of the default judgment last October, telling the court he tried to get the $503,318 (£372,832) through less extreme measures, but Minaj hadn’t responded.

Minaj’s eight-bedroom luxury home was recently appraised at $20 million (£14.8 million), and has a $13 million (£9.8 million) mortgage on it.

The application described Minaj as a global music superstar with an estimated net worth of at least $150 million (£111 million).

“There is little doubt that she is highly capable of paying the judgment in full, and yet she has refused to do so despite multiple written requests for payment and levies served upon several of her suspected creditors,” the filing revealed.