A federal judge in Manhattan, United States, has definitively dismissed a lawsuit that accused Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler of sexually assaulting a former model twice on the same day when she was a teenager in the mid-1970s.
US District Judge Lewis Kaplan said Jeanne Bellino could not sue him given a 2000 New York City law that protects victims of gender-based violence.
He stated that the city law was not retroactive and that Bellino's order would have expired on his 19th birthday.
Kaplan highlighted that it would be futile to file another complaint and dismissed Bellino's case so that it cannot be brought again. Kaplan dismissed an earlier lawsuit in February.
He also said two more recent state laws, the Adult Survivors Act and the Child Victims Act, did not fit Bellino's claim.
The judge said the first law only covered people who were at least 18 when they became victims, and the second did not cover claims filed after August 2021. Bellino sued in November 2023.
Lawyers for Bellino and Tyler did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
Tyler “vehemently” denied Bellino’s allegations, which include that he assaulted her in a phone booth and later in a hotel during the summer of 1975, when she was 17.
The woman reported that she met the singer after a friend arranged for her to meet Aerosmith after a fashion show in Manhattan.
Tyler also defended himself in a lawsuit in Los Angeles, where Julia Misley alleged that he sexually assaulted her in 1973, when she was 16 and he was 25.
Bellino's law firm represented Misley in that case.
Source: CNN Brasil
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