The most striking detail in Kenneth Petty’s latest legal move is not that he filed for dismissal, but what he filed alongside it.
A 1994 notarized letter, written by Jennifer Hough herself while Petty’s original criminal case was still pending, is now the centerpiece of his attempt to get her $20 million civil lawsuit thrown out of federal court.
Petty’s legal team submitted the filing on September 10, arguing that Hough’s own words from nearly three decades ago directly contradict the claims she is making today.
The letter, obtained by AllHipHop, was attached as a key exhibit and includes Hough’s handwritten statement that the day she said she was raped was “half true and half false.”
That phrase alone is doing a lot of heavy lifting in Petty’s argument. His lawyers contend it undermines her rape and emotional-distress claims at the core of the civil suit.
But the letter itself tells a more complicated story than a simple denial. Hough described an argument with Petty, writing that he told her if she had sex with him, she could leave, and that she agreed because she was already late for school and just wanted to go home.
That account, in her own words, describes a situation where her ability to leave was conditioned on compliance, which many legal observers and advocates would read as coercion rather than consent.
Petty was convicted on the underlying criminal charges in 1995, and this civil filing is not challenging that conviction.
The dismissal request is specifically targeted at Hough’s civil case, which is a separate legal track running alongside the criminal history, not an attempt to reopen or overturn what already happened in criminal court.
Hough has been public about the pressure she says she faced after going public with her accusations, including alleged intimidation connected to Nicki Minaj, who is Petty’s wife.
That part of the civil suit involves claims that go beyond the original assault and into what Hough describes as a coordinated campaign to silence her. Minaj has denied wrongdoing and has publicly questioned Hough’s account on multiple occasions.
The legal strategy here is clear. Petty’s team wants a judge to look at that 1994 letter and conclude that Hough’s current claims cannot survive given what she wrote at the time.
Whether a federal judge agrees that a letter written by a teenager in the middle of an active criminal case, potentially under pressure, should be treated as a definitive account is a very different question.
Hough’s supporters and legal advocates have pointed out that recantations and ambiguous statements made by assault survivors during active prosecutions are not uncommon, and courts have long grappled with how much weight to give documents produced under those circumstances.
The context in which the letter was written, including Hough’s age and the pressure that often accompanies such cases, is likely to be a major point of contention if the dismissal motion moves forward.
The case remains active in federal court, and Hough’s legal team has not yet filed their response to the September 10 motion.
