Tyler Perry is fighting to keep private text messages sealed away from accuser Mario Rodriguez, per TMZ, which reports the texts came up in the $77 million lawsuit over an alleged 2018 sexual assault and Perry now claims releasing them would cause "undue annoyance and embarrassment" to friends who had nothing to do with the case.
The texts exist. They were already produced in the litigation. And now the fight is not about what the lawsuit claims, it is about who gets to read the group chats. The ask is to seal them as "private," and the stated harm to the friends is "undue annoyance and embarrassment," which is a legal injury that could have been written in a writers room.
"Private" is doing a lot of work in these documents. The conversations reportedly involve financial matters, a category that has never caused a friend "undue annoyance" in the history of texting until a lawyer showed up. At what point does a text stop being private? When it is produced? When it is sealed? When it is subpoenaed? The documents do not say. The documents have a request.
The privacy fight has become the part of this case with consistent updates. Perry says the friends are uninvolved. Rodriguez has not responded. The $77 million lawsuit keeps its own schedule and the texts keep their own lawyers.
YOUR TURN: If the texts are private, why did they need a lawyer to say so?
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