Note: This article contains references to alleged sexual assault and harassment.
A California woman filed a police report with the Los Angeles Police Department against Diplo in August, alleging that he distributed nude photographs of her without permission, Pitchfork has learned. The woman, Shelly Auguste, has been involved in a legal battle with the superstar producer born Thomas Wesley Pentz since 2020, and this is the second time she has accused him of distributing revenge porn. (Diplo was not charged criminally over the initial allegation.) In November, the LAPD submitted Auguste’s new case to the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, where it is currently under review.
Auguste is currently suing Diplo for sexual battery, gender violence, intentional intrusion into private affairs, battery, assault, defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and fraud, as well as violation of the Ralph Civil Rights Act and violation of the Tom Bane Civil Rights Act, with a civil trial currently scheduled for April 2024. Diplo publicly denied her allegations in October 2021 after she filed her initial claim in June of that year.
Diplo is also currently suing Auguste for stalking, trespassing, and distributing private materials. The lawsuit, filed by Diplo in April 2021, alleges Auguste to be “dangerously unstable,” and claims she “made relentless efforts to communicate with him” after he ended their relationship, including through fake social media accounts.
When reached by Pitchfork for comment on the August police report, Diplo’s attorney, Bryan J. Freedman, said, “For more than three years, Shelly Auguste has been orchestrating an ongoing smear campaign against Wes—and this is just more of the same.”
Freedman added, “Now, Ms. Auguste is at it yet again. But Wes will defend himself, and, just as he has done every time Ms. Auguste has defamed, harassed and attacked him and his family, he will win.”
Shelly Auguste has said in her civil litigation that Diplo first contacted her on Twitter in 2014, when she was 17 and he was 35 or 36 years old. They formed an intermittent online correspondence predicated on her sending him nude photos, according to the lawsuit, and met in person at a nightclub in 2018. (According to the complaint filed by Diplo, he and Auguste first met over social media around 2018.) In April 2019, when Auguste was 22 years old, the two had sex for the first time. In her complaint, Auguste alleges that Diplo recorded the intercourse on his cell phone without consent and ejaculated inside of her without consent. According to both Auguste’s lawsuit against Diplo and Diplo’s lawsuit against Auguste, they had sex again in July 2019 after Diplo invited Auguste to his hotel room. Auguste’s lawsuit claims she was “highly intoxicated, barely able to walk or see straight,” but also describes their first sexual interaction that evening as “consensual.” However, the complaint also describes a second sexual encounter from the same evening: Auguste claims in her lawsuit that Diplo penetrated her nonconsensually while she “told [him] ‘no’ and tried to fight him off,” before getting dressed and running out of the hotel room crying.
As described in Auguste’s lawsuit, Diplo and Auguste then entered into a tumultuous cycle. In September 2019, according to her complaint, Auguste confronted Diplo at a party, claiming that he had given her a sexually transmitted infection after insisting he did not have one. She claims he ignored her. Around February 2020, according to the complaint, he invited her to his house. When she arrived, he texted her saying he was not home, she claims. (In competing civil litigation, Diplo says Auguste arrived unannounced and that he felt “uneasy” about the incident. It does not mention the claim that he gave her a sexually transmitted infection, but he publicly called the allegation “not true” in October 2021.)
The complaint claims that Diplo “appeared to get pleasure from putting down Ms. Auguste,” and that “he knew she was an impressionable and vulnerable young woman as he had groomed her since she was a teenager.” Diplo’s complaint describes him as having suffered “emotional distress” during this time period.
In November 2020, Auguste sought and was granted a temporary restraining order against Diplo. At the time, Freedman, Diplo’s lawyer, said that she “has been harassing [Diplo] and his family for more than a year and has repeatedly refused to stop doing so.” Diplo also secured his own restraining order against Auguste.
In July 2021, Auguste filed a police report accusing Diplo of recording and distributing sexual content without her permission. Auguste explained in her complaint that she sought legal action because “a fake Twitter page,” which she believes belonged to Diplo, shared “an unredacted photo of [her] vagina and breasts” online. The account posted the photo, she alleges, because she had “shared her true personal experiences with [Diplo]” on Twitter. At the time, California’s statute of limitations gave victims only one year after the content was posted to pursue legal action, and Auguste’s case expired. (Victims now have one year from the discovery of revenge porn to pursue legal action, per Senate Bill 23.) The Los Angeles city attorney’s office did not elaborate on the reason for declining to pursue charges.
In January 2021, the two signed a dual restraining order agreement, concurring not to disparage each other. In September 2022, an arbitrator determined that subsequent tweets and Instagram stories of Auguste’s constituted breaches of the agreement, resulting in a $1.2 million monetary award to Diplo. The media in tweets and Instagram stories in question included: a post showing a screenshot of a publicly stipulated protective order filed by Diplo, which would keep court testimony sealed from the public; praise for California’s then-new Senate Bill No. 1141 (which allowed family courts to consider coercive control as domestic violence), a repost of a Rihanna tweet saying “Never underestimate a man’s ability to make you feel guilty for his mistakes,” the Taylor Swift lyrics “I don’t regret it one bit, ’cause he had it coming,” and a post supporting the women who accused NFL player Deshaun Watson of sexual misconduct in 2021.
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In between the time of the dual restraining order agreement in January 2021 and the arbitration ruling in September 2022, Diplo and Auguste filed their competing lawsuits. Diplo filed his lawsuit against Auguste—alleging stalking, trespassing, and distributing private materials—in April 2021. Auguste filed her lawsuit against Diplo—alleging sexual battery, gender violence, and more—in June 2021.
(Shortly after Auguste filed her lawsuit, another woman also filed a suit against Diplo, alleging that she was coerced into performing oral sex on him at an after-party in Las Vegas in 2019. She also alleged that Diplo filmed the alleged incident nonconsensually. The woman withdrew her lawsuit within a month of its filing. An attorney for Diplo said upon the complaint’s withdrawal, “As we said when we first learned of this lawsuit, there was absolutely irrefutable evidence that proved that the allegations it contained were false. As soon as we shared that plethora of evidence with the plaintiff’s lawyers, they recognized that they needed to withdraw their suit immediately.”)
Auguste went to police with her new claim on Friday, August 18, 2023, “to report that she was the victim of Revenge Porn,” the police report states. In the report, it’s noted that Auguste told a police officer that she “sent […] nude videos and photographs to [Diplo] voluntarily. Those items were for him only and not to distribute to others.” She added that he “distributed some of the nude videos and photographs of her online,” as also alleged in her lawsuit.
The same day Auguste went to the police station, she said in the report, a woman contacted her on Instagram and told her that she had six nude photographs of her; Auguste explained in the report “that they were the photographs that either [Diplo] took or that she had given to him.”
Auguste, according to the police report, “believes that [Diplo] is distributing the nude photographs because he is mad at her for recently filing legal action against him. She stated that he wants to harass and embarrass her.”
Auguste was granted a new temporary restraining order against Diplo on September 18. On August 24, Diplo made a request for his own temporary restraining order. That request was denied, with the Superior Court of California stating in its explanation that “[t]here are insufficient articulable facts of harassment pled in this Petition to warrant the Court’s issuance of emergency temporary orders.” In October, a judge extended Auguste’s temporary restraining order until December 2023.
Auguste is currently enrolled in California’s Safe at Home program, which allows “victims of domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault, human trafficking and elder and dependent abuse, as well as reproductive health care workers, a substitute mailing address to receive first class, certified, and registered mail.”
“I think it’s time the music industry stops enabling the perpetual abuse that occurs,” Shelly Auguste said in a statement to Pitchfork. “I have been silenced for far too long. I hope that with this restraining order I can finally gain peace and protection. I hope that with the criminal investigation, the justice system gets it right this time.”
If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual assault, we encourage you to reach out for support:
RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline
http://www.rainn.org
1 800 656 HOPE (4673)
Crisis Text Line
SMS: Text “HELLO” or “HOLA” to 741-741
If you are being sexually harassed, you can report it to the authorities at your job, school, or local law enforcement. For more information go to https://www.rainn.org/ThatsHarassment
This article has been updated to clarify that Shelly Auguste says she did not allow Diplo to take photos of her.
