Earlier this month, reports surfaced that Usher allegedly failed to notify a few sexual partners that he reportedly has herpes. Since then, lawsuits have been filed, a news conference was held, and the award-winning artist has remained silent on the matter.
Now, another report on the situation has surfaced. According to TMZ, a Days Inn employee said the “Moving Mountains” singer did meet up with Quantasia Sharpton (a woman who alleged that Usher exposed her to the STD, although she didn’t contract herpes). Sharpton, who said she felt “like my rights were violated,” hired lawyer Lisa Bloom to spearhead the suit.
The Days Inn is located in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Usher was in town on Nov. 15, 2014, for a concert which Sharpton attended. She said Usher randomly selected her from the audience, went backstage, and exchanged numbers with someone in the artist’s camp. While Sharpton was in her hotel room, she received a call and Usher later arrived.
The hotel employee says she remembers seeing Usher and Sharpton talking in the lobby and then they presumably went to her room. The unnamed woman felt compelled to reveal this information because she took offense to the comment that someone in Usher’s camp said Sharpton isn’t his type and he never slept with her.
Bloom recently spoke with Billboard to refute Usher’s reported claims:
This is very interesting to me. Number one, there are a lot of videos that you can find very easily — I retweeted one of them — of Usher choosing to bring onstage a woman who is a plus-sized woman, dancing with her, very, very provocatively. If you look at his face in that video, he does not look like he’s mocking anyone. He looks like he’s into it, and he even lies back and has her grind on him onstage. I will say that all of the women who have called me have been big women, have been heavyset, plus-sized women. I think the easiest thing for us to win in this case is that Usher enjoys big women.
I also find it interesting that he’s choosing to have people make these statements for him and he still hasn’t denied the herpes allegations, which is really the core of the case. So he’s choosing to fat-shame Quantasia, who was one of his fans. Many of his fans look like her. I don’t think that’s appropriate. But the biggest problem that he has is videos showing that he’s clearly into big girls. Final thought I would just say on that is, beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, and shame on him for trying to embarrass her because of her size. Her incident, by the way, was a couple of years ago, and she was slimmer than she is now. She’s had a baby in the interim.
Since the reveal in July, three people have said they contracted herpes from Usher.