Jim Jones sued over video with topless women

NEW YORK (AP) - Two Texas women say they turned up topless in a Jim Jones video without their permission, and they're suing the New York-based rapper over the "Summer Time" shots...

TheGrio Staff

Feb 10, 2011

NEW YORK (AP) — Two Texas women say they turned up topless in a Jim Jones video without their permission, and they’re suing the New York-based rapper over the “Summer Time” shots.

Sharie Johnson and Samantha Stotts filed a lawsuit against the rapper Wednesday in New York, saying their privacy was violated by the shots in his “Summer Time” video, in which Jones and various others cavort on a tropical beach while he proclaims that he “can’t wait for the summer time.”

Lawyers for Jones didn’t immediately return telephone messages Thursday.

Johnson and Stotts, two Houston-area friends in their 20s, were on a hotel’s private beach last May in Miami Beach, Florida, when they noticed the “We Fly High” rapper’s film crew and an entourage, their lawyer, Taso Pardalis, said Thursday.

“They weren’t too impressed” and didn’t know who Jones was, Pardalis said.

The women initially didn’t realize they were being recorded and covered up or darted away when they did, Pardalis said. While one shot appeared to be a close-up, it was made from farther away, he said. They were aghast when a friend spotted the video online and alerted them this winter, the attorney said.

Johnson, a college student who works at a doctor’s office, and Stotts, who has worked in real estate, want unspecified damages and want to stop the videos from being disseminated. Both Johnson and Stotts are now expectant mothers, he said.

At least some copies were apparently removed from YouTube on Thursday after getting more than 30,000 views. Representatives for YouTube owner Google Inc. didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail inquiry Thursday.

Jones, 34, is one of the Diplomats, a Harlem-based rap crew that also counts Cam’ron, Juelz Santana and Freekey Zekey among its members.

Jones had one of the top-selling rap songs of 2007 with “We Fly High”; his other hits include “Pop Champagne.”

In 2009, he starred in “Hip-Hop Monologues: Inside the Life and Mind of Jim Jones,” an off-Broadway play that chronicled his life on the road and on the streets.

He had a brush with the law in a swanky setting in December 2008, when he punched a friend of R&B crooner Ne-Yo’s in the face in the Louis Vuitton store on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Jones pleaded guilty the next year to a misdemeanor assault charge and was sentenced to time served — the few hours he was in custody after turning himself in to police.