Axl Rose and the former model who sued him last year for sexual assault have reached a private settlement, Rolling Stone has learned. In a statement, Rose maintained he did not violently attack and rape plaintiff Sheila Kennedy in a Manhattan hotel room in 1989, as she alleged.
“As I have from the beginning, I deny the allegations. There was no assault,” the Guns N’ Roses frontman tells Rolling Stone. The terms of the private pact were not disclosed.
“Mr. Rose has suffered greatly from this lawsuit, and I am pleased that he will now be able to move on with his life,” Rose’s lawyer, E. Danya Perry, said in a separate statement.
The parties recently filed paperwork in New York stating they had agreed to discontinue the case with prejudice, meaning it can’t be filed again at a later date. They further agreed to cover their own legal costs, the filing obtained by Rolling Stone said. Attempts to reach Kennedy and her lawyer were not immediately successful.
In her lawsuit filed last November — just a day before the deadline to file otherwise expired claims under New York’s Adult Survivors Act — Kennedy claimed that Rose assaulted her in February 1989 after they met at a nightclub. An actress and model who was Penthouse magazine’s 1983 “Pet of the Year” and who appeared on the publication’s cover four times, Kennedy said she ended up in Rose’s luxury hotel suite on Central Park West a short time later because he was hosting an afterparty there.
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