Mariah Carey has settled the $3 million lawsuit she filed against her former assistant, Lianna “Azarian” Shakhnazaryan, in 2019 for an undisclosed amount.
On Wednesday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Andrew Borrok closed out the suit by plainly writing, “Case settled,” according to a decision obtained by Page Six. Carey’s lawyer declined the outlet’s request to comment further on the results of the settlement. In the original lawsuit, Carey accused Shakhnazaryan, whom she reportedly fired in 2017, of secretly recording embarrassing videos of her performing various “personal activities,” including, in some cases, “intimate” content. According to the pop star, her ex-employee then attempted to blackmail her with those videos, threatening to release them unless she was given $8 million. Carey also claimed that Shakhnazaryan violated a nondisclosure agreement she signed when she began working for her in 2015. On the same day that Carey filed her lawsuit, Shakhnazaryan filed a lawsuit of her own, claiming that she was the victim of battery and sexual harassment during the approximately two years she worked for the musician before being wrongfully terminated.
In February of last year, Carey went on to accuse Shakhnazaryan of destroying some of the evidence at the center of this lawsuit that the singer says would have bolstered her case against her. Justice Borrok sided with Carey, granting her request to penalize her former assistant and issuing sanctions after he found that Shakhnazaryan did in fact destroy two videos and WhatsApp messages that might have been pertinent to the case. He also determined that, after the lawsuit had already been filed, Shakhnazaryan spilled water over her old cell phone before giving it away, which he found was destruction of evidence. “Trading in her cellphone without taking any measures to save the videos, messages, and other data after this lawsuit was filed, when Ms. Shakhnazarian had an undeniable duty to preserve evidence, was grossly negligent, if not intentional,” Borrok wrote in his decision, according to Page Six, ordering Shakhnazaryan to turn over her current cell phone for forensic examination and pay Carey’s attorney fees for that specific matter. Shakhnazaryan’s appeal of that ruling is still pending.
Shakhnazaryan’s legal team did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
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