A lawsuit accusing singer Bob Dylan of drugging and sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl in 1965 has been dropped following allegations that she destroyed evidence in the case.According to NBC News, Manhattan Federal Judge Katherine Polk Failla dismissed the case on Thursday “with prejudice,” meaning that the plaintiff will be unable to re-file the complaint.Orin Synder, an attorney for Dylan, celebrated the ruling while deriding the lawsuit as a “lawyer-driven sham” intended to extract wrongful damages from the singer.“This case over,” Synder said. “It is outrageous that it was ever brought in the first place.”NBC News reports that the attorneys for the plaintiff, identified in court documents only by the initials “J.C.,” did not immediately return to a request for comment.The lawsuit, adds NBC, was filed last year.In her complaint. J.C. claims that Dylan befriended her in May 1965 and “established ana emotional connection with her,” intended to “lower her inhibitions with the object of sexually abusing her, which he did.”

A gavel. Image via Wikimedia Commons via Flickr/user: Brian Turner. (CCA-BY-2.0).

The lawsuit asserts that Dylan repeatedly victimized the girl on different dates at his Hotel Chelsea apartment in Manhattan.The abuse, adds NBC News, allegedly occurred between April and May 1965.J.C. said that Dylan controlled with her drugs, alcohol, and threats of physical violence. The girl was purportedly left with emotional scars and irreversible psychological trauma.Dylan has denied the accusations since the lawsuit was first filed.Shortly before the court’s ruling, Snyder sent Failla a letter suggesting that J.C. had misrepresented elements of the case against Dylan and had “destroyed evidence directly relevant to the central factual allegations in this litigation.”Snyder informed the court that J.C. had, among other things, failed to produce emails related to her claim.“These are not just any emails,” Snyder wrote. “They are emails from 2021 (after the filing of the lawsuit) to and from Plaintiff herself discussing—and casting doubt on—key factual allegations she has made in the lawsuit.”"To put a finer point on it, the other participants in these emails directly question inconsistencies and impossibilities in Plaintiff’s allegations, and Plaintiff responds point-by-point in reply emails, which themselves are both internally inconsistent and inconsistent with material allegations in this case,” Snyder wrote.Snyder then asked Failla to dismiss the lawsuit, saying that, since J.C. could not produce emails or text messages related to the case, Dylan’s “ability to mount a fair defense have [sic] been compromised irretrievably.”

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Lawsuit accusing Bob Dylan of drugging and sexually assaulting 12-year-old in 1965 is dismissedWoman who accused Bob Dylan of sexually abusing her for 6 weeks in 1965, when she was 12, drops lawsuit