A Lawyer Seeking Sean Combs Accusers via Hotline Files 6 Lawsuits

The Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee filed suits in New York with new allegations of rape and sexual assault from 1995 to 2021. Mr. Combs denied the accusations.

The embattled music mogul Sean Combs is facing six more sexual assault lawsuits in New York, including one from a man who accused Mr. Combs of groping his genitals when he was 16, in what a team of lawyers say are the first filings from dozens of plaintiffs.

The lawsuits, filed on Monday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, also accuse Mr. Combs of raping two men and two women and forcing another man to perform oral sex in allegations that span from 1995 to 2021. All of the claims were filed anonymously.

The filings further intensify the legal troubles facing Mr. Combs, the longtime record executive and performer known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, as he awaits a trial for federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges in a Brooklyn jail. He has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers said in a statement in response to the new lawsuits that “Mr. Combs has never sexually assaulted anyone — adult or minor, man or woman.”

The new lawsuits were brought by a personal injury lawyer in Houston, Tony Buzbee, who has used Instagram and a widely publicized news conference to solicit clients. Mr. Buzbee detailed the scope of his work at the news conference this month, where he spoke in front of a backdrop displaying a large red hotline number that people with claims against Mr. Combs could call.

“After the indictment of Sean Combs and the announcement that we were pursuing these claims, the floodgates opened,” Mr. Buzbee said at the news conference.

In one of the lawsuits filed on Monday, a plaintiff recounts a 1998 encounter with Mr. Combs at one of the entertainer’s famous White Parties at his mansion in the Hamptons. The suit says the plaintiff, who was 16 at the time, bumped into Mr. Combs and shared his dreams of “becoming a star,” after which Mr. Combs told him that he needed to drop his pants. When the plaintiff complied, the suit says, Mr. Combs grabbed and squeezed his genitals.

Mr. Buzbee is a well-known figure in the world of plaintiff’s lawyers, securing settlements for at least 30 women who accused the N.F.L. quarterback Deshaun Watson of sexual misconduct during massage appointments. He said his staff is carefully vetting a large number of complaints about Mr. Combs that the law office has fielded since it began its outreach efforts. In one 24-hour period, Mr. Buzbee has said, the hotline received thousands of calls. The law firm’s website also uses a chatbot that asks if visitors are “victims of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs.”

Mr. Combs’s representatives have presented the operation as part of a “reckless media circus.” But on Monday, the forecasting of claims turned into concrete legal filings that the mogul must respond to in court.