Nicki Minaj just saved her $20 million Hidden Hills mansion by coughing up half a million dollars at the absolute last second.
The “Super Bass” rapper finally paid German security guard Thomas Weidenmuller his $503,318 judgment on Thursday afternoon. This happened just hours before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Cindy Pánuco was set to order the forced sale of her eight-bedroom estate.
“She has satisfied the judgment,” Weidenmuller’s attorney Paul Saso told Rolling Stone. “It required us going to the one-yard line.”
Saso called it an “eleventh-hour development” when he informed Judge Pánuco about the settlement. The judge seemed relieved after months of legal drama over the unpaid debt.
“I wanted to make sure we got this right. It was a big thing. I’m glad this was resolved in a way that makes sense for all of the parties,” Judge Pánuco said from the bench.
The whole mess started back in 2019 during Minaj’s concert in Frankfurt, Germany. Weidenmuller was working security when things went sideways backstage.
According to court documents, a fan breached the barricade and climbed onstage during Minaj’s performance. The rapper got heated and blamed a female security guard for the security breach.
Minaj started “berating the female security guard while recording the exchange,” Weidenmuller testified.
When he stepped in to defend his colleague, telling Minaj that it wasn’t fair for the guard’s career to be “ruined” on social media, the situation exploded.
Minaj allegedly “threw a shoe at Weidenmuller but missed.” That’s when her husband, Kenneth Petty, jumped into the mix.
Petty “accused him of disrespecting Minaj and punched him in the face, leaving him stunned and disoriented,” according to the lawsuit. The punch was so brutal that Weidenmuller needed emergency hospitalization for 10 days.
The security guard underwent multiple reconstructive surgeries and still hasn’t fully recovered.
“I now have five plates in my jaw, and my jaw has not yet been fully reconstructed. The doctors must still insert implants into my jaw as a part of the reconstruction process,” he explained.
Doctors even “inserted donor bones from a deceased person into my mouth in order to preserve space for the future implants.” The medical bills and ongoing treatment costs piled up fast.
Weidenmuller filed his lawsuit in January 2022, originally seeking $721,000 for medical expenses, lost wages, and pain and suffering. But Nicki Minaj and Kenneth Petty completely ignored the case.
Their lawyers made “repeated attempts” to serve them with court papers but couldn’t make contact at their gated Calabasas community. Process servers visited multiple times without success. Eventually, attorneys had to publish the summons in a newspaper.
Because Minaj and Petty never responded, Judge Pánuco awarded Weidenmuller a default judgment in 2024. She trimmed his request down to $503,318, but the couple still refused to pay.
Court records show Minaj has an estimated net worth of at least $150 million, making her “highly capable of paying the judgment in full.” Despite this financial capacity, she initially “refused to do so despite multiple written requests for payment” – until today.
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