Fat Joe won sanctions after a judge said Tyrone Blackburn’s claim that medicine caused his deposition behavior did not match the record.
Tyrone Blackburn blamed medication for a deposition meltdown in Fat Joe’s court fight, but a federal judge said the excuse did not hold up and hit him with sanctions anyway.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Jennifer E. Willis found that Blackburn and his client, Terrance Dixon, wrecked one deposition and derailed another during Fat Joe’s ugly legal war with his former hype man. The judge granted sanctions in part, denied Blackburn’s cross-motion, and ordered a second deposition for Dixon after finding that the first was badly compromised.
Willis did not mince words. She wrote that the attacks aimed at Fat Joe’s lawyer, “including homophobic, transphobic, and sexualized comments about his mother shock the conscience.” She added, “The Court has never seen the sort of behavior from an attorney that Blackburn engaged in at the deposition on February 24th.”
According to the order, Blackburn called opposing counsel a “p############,” asked, “what date is your transition surgery?” and said, “Your mother is an alleged criminal…she should have spit you out instead of swallowing.”
The judge also highlighted one moment where Dixon and Blackburn started talking tough in the middle of sworn testimony. “I could take you down with my left hand,” Dixon said. Blackburn piled on, saying, “Everybody could take you down” and “very easily.”
The judge said the insults were only part of the problem.
She found Blackburn kept telling Dixon not to answer questions, even after Judge Jennifer Rochon had already ruled that he had to respond unless privilege applied. Willis wrote that the improper objections, interruptions and refusal to answer questions kept coming for hours.
She said the damage was so severe that Fat Joe now gets another two hours to question Dixon on a limited set of topics.
Blackburn later tried to explain away his own shaky March 6 deposition by pointing to pain medication after medical procedures earlier in the year. He had already told the court he was taking narcotics after surgeries on January 23 and February 3.
But Willis said the record did not support his claim that medicine caused the subsequent chaos.
She wrote, “The medical record does not support Blackburn’s assertion that his unconscionable behavior at the February 24th deposition was due to medication he was taking.”
She also said there was no proof the medicine caused the “selective amnesia” he showed on March 6, when he struggled to answer basic questions and could not clearly say whether he represented Dixon.
That point matters because Blackburn had framed the March 6 s### show as a health issue in a letter to the court. Willis was not buying it. She said if he was too impaired to sit for a deposition, he should have asked for a delay before showing up.
The sanctions order is the latest turn in a long and bitter fight between Fat Joe and Dixon, who worked as his hype man from roughly 2006 to 2019.
Fat Joe sued first in April 2025, accusing Dixon, Blackburn and Blackburn’s law firm of defamation after a stream of social media posts and interviews accused the rapper of serious crimes.
In June 2025, Dixon fired back with a $20 million lawsuit of his own, accusing Fat Joe of coercive labor, fraud and sexual abuse over many years. Fat Joe has denied those claims and called them lies built to extort him.
This is not Blackburn’s first warning shot from the bench either. Willis noted that other judges have already called out his conduct.
In this same case, Judge Rochon had earlier found the defendants in contempt for skipping court-ordered depositions. Willis also pointed to past decisions that criticized Blackburn for inaccurate filings, personal attacks and even fake AI-generated case citations.
By the end of the new order, Willis took the extra step of referring Blackburn to the Southern District’s Grievance Committee. She called his conduct “outrageously unprofessional and unacceptable.” She also said his choice to go forward while claiming narcotic impairment showed “poor judgment and disregard for the judicial process.”
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