Fat Joe is calling out attorney Tyrone Blackburn for allegedly packing a court filing with fake, AI-generated legal citations.
In court docs reviewed by Complex, the rapper’s legal team said Blackburn’s motion to dismiss his defamation lawsuit was full of “misrepresentations and fabrications of legal authority clearly generated by AI.” They pointed to “at least ten instances” where Blackburn allegedly cited “hallucinated” cases — either non-existent rulings or distorted versions of real ones.
Fat Joe, born Joseph Cartagena, filed the lawsuit earlier this year against his former hypeman, Terrance Dixon, along with Blackburn. He accuses them of trying to extort him with false claims of sexual misconduct and underage relationships in order to ruin his reputation and pressure him into a multimillion-dollar payout.
The complaint says Dixon and Blackburn circulated fake social media posts accusing Joe of pedophilia and murder-for-hire plots. Blackburn filed a motion in August to have the case tossed, but Fat Joe’s lawyers say the filing is “fundamentally untrustworthy.”
“Blackburn’s egregious misconduct in drafting the Motion overshadows Defendants’ substantive arguments,” the filing states, accusing him of “irresponsibly rely[ing] on artificial intelligence-generated content without manual verification.” Joe’s team also pointed to Blackburn’s history of similar issues.
“It is time, once and for all, for Blackburn to be sanctioned for his flagrant disregard of his duties and responsibilities to the court in fabricating and intentionally misconstruing legal authority,” they added.
Fat Joe’s lawyers are asking the judge to deny the dismissal, hit Blackburn with sanctions, and let the lawsuit move forward. The court has yet to rule on the motion.
This isn’t the first time Blackburn has been accused of such misconduct. Judges have previously reprimanded him for filings “replete with inaccurate statements of law” and “wholly fabricated quotations from caselaw.” In one Pennsylvania case, a judge found he had made “a conscious effort to deceive and mislead the Court.”
In another defamation case involving pastor T.D. Jakes, U.S. District Judge William Stickman ordered Blackburn to pay over $76,000 in legal fees after discovering AI-generated citations and false claims in filings, calling it “clear ethical violations of the highest order.”
