Nicki Minaj has avoided the sale of her $20 million Hidden Hills mansion to pay the $500,000 default judgment that a security guard won after suing the “Starships” rapper and her husband over his alleged assault at a concert in Germany.
“She has satisfied the judgment,” the guard’s lawyer, Paul Saso, tells Rolling Stone. “It required us going to the one-yard line.”
Saso confirmed the payment just as Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Cindy Pánuco was on the cusp of entering a blockbuster decision to sell the home at a hearing on Thursday afternoon. Plaintiff Thomas Weidenmuller nearly won the ruling in November but faced a delay because he lacked a bank statement detailing Minaj’s payments on her $13.3 million mortgage and the daily interest accrual. The judge wanted to cover her bases in case the house didn’t fetch the expected price.
“Let’s say there’s no bidder who offers the full $20 million, and it goes up for auction, and they don’t get fair market value, and it doesn’t cover everything,” Pánuco hypothesized at the last hearing. She said the bank information was necessary for her to confirm that a proposed sale price would be enough to cover the remaining bank lien, Minaj’s homestead exemption, and the $500,000 judgment – otherwise it wouldn’t be accepted. Saso said he was confident the sale would yield enough to cover everything, but the judge wouldn’t budge.
Weidenmuller filed his application for the order last October, telling the court he tried to enforce his default judgment through less extreme measures, but Minaj and her husband, Kenneth Petty, hadn’t responded. He said attempts to garnish payments flowing to Minaj proved futile, claiming seven “potential garnishees” either failed to respond or claimed they had no accounts payable to the singer.
“There is no doubt that the sale of the dwelling would satisfy the entire judgment, with millions to spare,” the sale application obtained by Rolling Stone said. “Although it is regrettable that the extraordinary measure of forcing the sale of Minaj’s dwelling is required, that result is entirely the product of her intransigence in not making payment.”
Minaj’s eight-bedroom luxury home has a $13,258,000 mortgage lien, and Minaj, as the sole owner, would be entitled to a $722,151 homestead exemption, the application said. With the home recently appraised at $20 million, a sale would yield approximately $6 million in funds once the lien and exception were paid, it estimated.
The application described Minaj as a global music superstar with an estimated net worth of at least $150 million. “There is little doubt that she is highly capable of paying the judgment in full, and yet, she has refused to do so despite multiple written requests for payment and levies served upon several of her suspected creditors,” the filing said.
Weidenmuller filed his underlying lawsuit in January 2022. He claimed Petty ambushed him from behind and sucker punched him in the face because he was upset Weidenmuller had stepped in to defend a female security guard during a dispute with Minaj backstage at a 2019 concert in Frankfurt.
According to Weidenmuller, Minaj had blamed the female guard for allowing a fan to breach a barricade and climb onstage with her. Minaj berated the female guard while recording the exchange. Weidenmuller says he intervened to warn Minaj the guard’s career might be “ruined” if Minaj shared the video. In response, Minaj allegedly threw a shoe at Weidenmuller but missed. Petty then accused Weidenmuller of disrespecting Minaj and allegedly punched Weidenmuller in the face, leaving him “stunned and disoriented,” the lawsuit claimed.
“I felt a blinding pain in my head, neck, face, and jaw. I could tell in that instant that something was seriously wrong with my jaw,” he wrote in a court filing. Weidenmuller said medics called an ambulance to take him to a hospital, where he underwent the first of several surgeries and remained for 10 days.
“I now have five plates in my jaw, and my jaw has not yet been fully reconstructed. The doctors must still insert implants into my jaw as a part of the reconstruction process. In the interim, the doctors have inserted donor bones from a deceased person into my mouth in order to preserve space for the future implants,” he wrote in a sworn statement.
Weidenmuller previously asked for around $21,000 to cover medical bills and $700,000 for his ongoing injury along with pain and suffering. The judge trimmed it down to $503,318 when she awarded the money under a default judgment because Minaj and Petty never responded to the lawsuit.
The German security guard and his lawyers told the court they made repeated attempts to serve Minaj and Petty with the lawsuit but were never successful. They mailed copies and sent a process server to the couple’s gated community just west of Los Angeles, but never made contact. They eventually published the summons in a newspaper.
A rep for Minaj and Petty did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Rolling Stone sent Monday. The couple married in 2019 and welcomed a son a year later. Petty, 47, remains a defendant in a sexual assault lawsuit filed in Brooklyn federal court by Jennifer Hough, the woman at the center of Petty’s 1994 attempted rape conviction.
Hough claims Petty accosted her at a Queens bus stop in September 1994 when they were high school students. She claims he forced her to a nearby residence at knifepoint and raped her. Petty was ultimately convicted of first-degree attempted rape in 1995 and spent four and a half years in prison. Decades later, in January 2020, he was charged with failing to register as a sex offender when he moved to Los Angeles in 2019. He was sentenced to three years of probation and briefly placed on house arrest in 2023 for violating the terms of the probation.
Minaj has sparked controversy for other reasons lately. She bashed California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a series of X posts last month after he made a statement supporting trans youth. A week later, the “Barbie World” singer made a surprise appearance at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest as Erika Kirk, the conservative activist and widow of TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, gushed over the anti-Newsom tweets. Minaj then professed her “love” for President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. She later called for former CNN anchor Don Lemon’s arrest after he covered an anti-ICE protest at a Minnesota church, leading the now-independent journalist to label her “ignorant.”
“She doesn’t understand politics. She doesn’t understand journalism,” Lemon said. “And I’m not surprised that she is weighing in on something that is beyond her capacity.”
