'Trolling is not slander': Ray J asks court to dismiss defamation suit brought by Kim Kardashian

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Attorneys for Ray J, the singer, songwriter and reality TV personality, asked a Superior Court judge on Tuesday to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against him by his onetime paramour, Kim Kardashian.

The two have been engaged in a bitter feud for decades, ever since a sex video featuring the pair was made public. It finally spilled into the courts last year, when Kardashian sued Ray J in Los Angeles Superior Court, accusing him of sustaining a “campaign of harassment and defamation” against her and her mother, Kris Jenner.

Ray J, whose real name is William Norwood, had appeared on a Fox talk show special about the Sean “Diddy” Combs RICO trial, in which he defended his longtime friend and music mogul and, in passing, compared him unfavorably to the Kardashians, stating, “If you told me that the Kardashians were being charged for racketeering, I might believe it."

He later reiterated this view online, telling a group of friends on a livestream, “The federal RICO I’m about to drop on Kris and Kim is about to be crazy."

Norwood filed an anti-SLAPP motion to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing his statements were not provably false assertions of objective fact. He offered two somewhat novel defenses; first, he argued he was merely “trolling” the Kardashians, not real accusations.

“Norwood is also widely known as a successful ’troll’ — a person who engages in provocation, insults people, and talks a lot of smack online or on streaming platforms,” he wrote in the motion. “‘Trolling’ is not slander; rather, it is a skill that streamers (like Norwood) wield to generate public discourse and create chaos, which, in turn, increases viewership, online following, popularity, and influence."

His other defense: He relied on ChatGPT for research.

“On Sept. 2, 2025, Norwood input into ChatGPT: ‘You know, we’re about to file a lawsuit on the Kardashians out here for federal RICO and for civil RICO and coercion and everything else you have all the files?’” Norwood wrote in the motion. “ChatGPT responded that his RICO case was ‘strong.’”

He also suggested he did not know the livestream was being recorded.

To be successful, a defamation lawsuit has to prove a number of things: that the statement is false; that it’s a statement of fact, rather than opinion or hyperbole; that it was said with malice or reckless disregard for the truth; and that it damaged the plaintiff. To defeat an anti-SLAPP motion, the plaintiff must offer a certain amount of evidence that all those requirements can be met.

“Mr. Norwood despises the Kardashians,” said attorney Bob Schwartz, representing Kardashian, on Tuesday. “He has been having legal fights with them for years. When he said what he said, he knew that it was false.”

He later added: “This is not a use of rhetoric. It’s multiple repeated statements about specific things that the federal government is going to do or has been done. It’s not hyperbole. They’re either true or false. Nobody listening to him on TMZ thought it was hyperbole.”

To support that last claim, Schwartz pointed to comments and social media posts in which people seemed to believe the Kardashians were, in effect, running some sort of criminal enterprise. But Superior Court Judge Steven Ellis made clear that he didn’t think much of that evidence, telling Schwartz, “We don’t know what they really thought. These people might have been joking.”

The long hearing began with the playing of two video clips from the Fox special and from the livestream, which aired on the platform “Twitch” and appeared to feature Norwood and a group of friends bantering amiably. As for the first clip from the special, Schwartz told the judge: “There’s no question at all this is a defamatory statement, that it was not made in jest. Either the Kardashians were being charged with racketeering, or they were not. And that’s defamation.”

Schwartz also pointed out that a voice can be heard on the Twitch stream warning Norwood: “We’re live.”

“He knew what he was saying,” Schwartz said.

But Norwood’s attorney, Jackson Trugman, defended the livestream, telling the judge, “This is just a livestream of people hanging out. It’s not a news program.”

Norwood has accused the Kardashians of a number of things in the past, which might be considered to be “RICO predicates,” at least in his thinking. Some have claimed Kardashian and Jenner helped leak the couple’s 2003 sex tape in order to gain notoriety. As it had for Paris Hilton before her, the tape’s release catapulted Kardashian into worldwide fame and launched the Kardashian brand. Both Kardashian and Jenner have vehemently denied this. Norwood has also accused Kardashian and her siblings of racking up $850,000 in charges on his credit card.

“There is absolutely no evidence to show that Norwood had an actual awareness of probable falsity of anything he said,” Trugman argued.

Ellis took the arguments under submission and asked for additional briefing on whether or not the statements Norwood made had done emotional damage to Kardashian. Ellis gave no indication as to which direction he was leaning.

Earlier this year, Norwood announced on social media that his health was failing and that he may only have months to live.

“I thought,” Norwood said on a livestream, “I could handle all the alcohol, I could handle all the Adderall, I could handle all the drugs, but I couldn’t.”

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