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UFC President Dana White is seeking to dismiss a lawsuit that names him as the victim of a sex tape extortion plot.
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal UFC President Dana White filed court papers seeking to dismiss a lawsuit that names him as a sex tape extortion victim. The suit was filed in April by Ernesto Joshua Ramos, who recently served prison time for attempting to extort an ‘unnamed businessman’. Ramos also named the UFC as a defendant in his lawsuit.
In his suit against White, Ramos, 43, claimed the promoter failed to pay him an agreed upon $450,000 for not disclosing White’s name in a now closed sex tape case. In his suit Ramos also claimed that he did not demand money from White.
Instead, Ramos alleges that White’s lawyers approached him during a criminal case and offered him a substantial amount of money to plead guilty and thus avoid a public trial that would reveal the name/s of his victim/s.
This whole affair started in October 2014. That’s when a rendezvous occurred in Brazil between an adult nightclub dancer and an ‘unnamed businessman’.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal says that during this time White was in Brazil to oversee a UFC event. UFC 179: Aldo vs. Mendes 2 was held in Rio de Janeiro on October 25, 2014.
In his lawsuit, Ramos claims that White was the unnamed business man and that he was in Brazil with an adult entertainer who worked at Spearmint Rhino in Las Vegas. The lawsuit said White had been seeing the woman for months prior to this incident and that he paid her larges sums of money to dance for him.
The lawsuit further alleges that, in Brazil, the woman used her cellphone to secretly record her and White having sex.
Ramos was arrested in January 2015 and charged with trying to extort $200,000 from a businessman whose name was not disclosed by prosecutors. Ramos agreed to a plea deal with prosecutors and received a sentence of 366 days in prison (per Associated Press).
In their motion to dismiss, White’s lawyers called Ramos’ lawsuit a ‘smear’ effort, writing the following:
“Some parties never learn. After pleading guilty to a felony of attempting to extort defendant Dana White and spending nearly a year in federal prison, plaintiff Joshua Ramos now seeks this court’s assistance to complete what he could not finish the first time — separating Mr. White from a substantial amount of money.
“Just because Ramos is carrying out the latest scheme through the artifice of a civil lawsuit does not make it any less proper. Fortunately for the court and defendants, Ramos’ attempts at civil extortion are just as inept as his prior criminal endeavors.”