Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee faces accusations of sexual assault in a new lawsuit filed on Friday.
The assault in question allegedly took place during a February 2003 helicopter trip from San Diego County to Van Nuys, California, which Lee took with plaintiff Jane Doe (via Rolling Stone). She accused Lee of “forcibly groping, kissing and penetrating her with his fingers, and attempting to force her to perform oral copulation” during the trip.
The lawsuit states that the woman had met and befriended the pilot, David Martz, the previous year while working at the bank he frequented. Martz invited her to ride in his helicopter for a sightseeing trip around San Diego County. When she got to the helicopter, however, Martz informed her that they would instead be taking Lee to Los Angeles.
According to the complaint, Martz brandished alcohol and began mixing drinks as soon as they hit the skies. He and Lee allegedly drank, smoked marijuana and snorted cocaine throughout the flight. Martz then called the woman up to the cockpit to sit on Lee’s lap, to which she reluctantly agreed.
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That’s when Lee allegedly forced himself upon the woman, groping and kissing her and “[becoming] more forceful” when she tried to resist. “At one point,” the complaint says, “Lee penetrated plaintiff with his fingers while fondling her breasts. Lee then pulled down his pants and attempted to force plaintiff’s head toward his genitals. By this point, plaintiff was in tears, but she had nowhere to go — she was trapped with little mobility to leave the cockpit.”
Martz “merely watched” as this happened and flew the woman back to San Diego after dropping Lee in Van Nuys. They fell out of touch and only spoke once by phone before Martz died in a plane crash in 2015. He’d lost his pilot’s license three times before that — including once in 2009 after having oral sex with an adult film actress while flying — and was facing a fourth revocation at the time of his death, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The woman claimed Lee’s alleged assault caused her “great shock, distress, humilitian, shame and guilt.” She initially chose not to report it because she thought it was an isolated incident, but she now believes Martz and Lee “had a history of engaging in indecent and illegal conduct on Martz’s helicopter.”
Tommy Lee’s Previous Abuse Allegations
This is hardly the first allegation of violence or sexual misconduct levied against Lee. The drummer went to jail for six months in 1998 after allegedly attacking then-wife Pamela Anderson while she was holding their 7-week-old son, Dylan. In Motley Crue’s 2001 autobiography The Dirt, bassist Nikki Sixx claimed that he and Lee “pretty much” raped a woman at a party when, in the middle of having sex with her, Sixx left the room and had Lee take over for him without the woman’s knowledge or consent.
Despite these indiscretions, Motley Crue remains enormously popular. They recently completed a global stadium tour and have already announced several 2024 festival appearances. In fact, Lee told Bill Maher in October that the band recently recorded a song called “Canceled,” acknowledging that they never experienced severe consequences for their misbehavior.
“There was this article that was like, ‘How did Motley Crue ever not get canceled?'” Lee said. “And we were like, ‘Fuck, we’ve got to write a song about that because we didn’t ever get it.’ We snuck in under the whatever threshold, wherever that was, where we got away with fucking murder.”
Tommy Lee Year-by-Year Photos 1981-2021
A look at the Motley Crue drummer through dozens of pictures.
Gallery Credit: Dave Lifton
