Lawyers for both megachurch founder Bishop T.D. Jakes and former-pastor-turned-registered sex offender Duane Youngblood, who alleges he was sexually assaulted by Jakes when he was a teenager some 40 years ago, have accused each other of making errors and improperly using artificial intelligence in an ongoing defamation lawsuit filed by Jakes.
The 67-year-old pastor who founded The Potter’s House in Dallas, Texas, nearly 30 years ago, and now serves as chairman of the T.D. Jakes Foundation, initially filed the defamation lawsuit against Youngblood, 58, last November, a day after suffering a heart attack while preaching.
In court filings last month, Jakes’ high-profile attorney, Dustin Pusch, argued that Youngblood’s motion to dismiss his lawsuit pursuant to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 12(b)(6), which allows a defendant to move to dismiss a complaint if it doesn’t allege enough facts to support a plausible legal claim, should be denied for “many reasons,” including what he calls “counterfeit caselaw.”
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“In reality, the Complaint more than adequately pleads each and every necessary element for his defamation and conspiracy claims. It is unclear whether the Motion to Dismiss is the product of a fever dream, generated through improper use of AI software, or some combination of the two,” Pusch wrote.
“Regardless, Youngblood’s Motion is without legal or factual merit, his perversions of cited case law and the record in this case must be ignored and accounted for, and the Motion should be denied so that Bishop Jakes can proceed with proving his case and vindicating his name,” he added.
In a flurry of filings in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania this week, Youngblood’s attorney, Tyrone Blackburn, redirected the allegations Jakes’ attorneys made against him of fabricating or misquoting caselaw.
“Plaintiff accuses Defendant of relying on fabricated or inapplicable case law, yet a LexisNexis Document Analysis of Plaintiff’s own opposition brief reveals a pattern of misquotation, superficial citation, and invocation of authorities that are either inapposite or do not support the propositions for which they are cited. Lexis Quote-Check identifies at least 20 incorrect quotations in Plaintiff’s brief,” Blackburn argued.
“Numerous cases cited by Plaintiff are referenced without pinpoints, quoted inaccurately, or applied without any legal or factual context. This rhetorical sleight-of-hand stands in direct contradiction to Plaintiff’s demands for precision and undermines the credibility of the opposition brief. Federal courts do not accept citation as performance—a case reference must meaningfully connect to the legal standard and be applied to the facts at hand,” he added.
Blackburn also doubled down on his position that Jakes’ defamation lawsuit should be dismissed because it mainly relies on the megachurch founder’s denial of the allegations of abuse.
“The claims for defamation and civil conspiracy are not merely insufficient; they fall well short of the constitutional and procedural thresholds required to proceed. As a self-identified public figure, Plaintiff is obligated to plead falsity and actual malice with factual specificity. He has not done so,” Blackburn argued in the conclusion of his filing on Monday.
“The Complaint relies on inference, implication, and generalized accusations without identifying any provably false statement by Defendant Youngblood made with the requisite culpable state of mind.”
Jakes’ attorneys rejected Blackburn’s claim that they made similar mistakes like he did in his filing as “false.” They argued that the errors he picked up in using the LexisNexis AI tool were mostly from quotations of his filing.
“First, in the Reply, Defendant and his counsel lob false accusations at Plaintiff’s counsel, accusing them of making misrepresentations much like the ones he made in the Motion to Dismiss (and failed to defend),” Jakes’ attorneys wrote.
“In making these false accusations, Defendant and his counsel claim to have conducted an AI analysis through LexisNexis showing ‘a pattern of misquotation, superficial citation, and invocation of authorities that are either inapposite or do not support the propositions for which they are cited’ and ‘at least 20 incorrect quotations in Plaintiff’s brief.’”
Jakes’ attorneys argued that Blackburn did not include his AI report in his filing and insisted that the two examples he cited from their filing were properly quoted.
“Plaintiff’s counsel recreated the very same analysis through LexisNexis…., which confirms that there are in fact no misquotations, superficial citations, inapposite authorities, or any other sort of malfeasance with regard to the Opposition—rather, the system flags a variety of actual quotations (including the two cited in Defendant’s Reply). The only truly ‘incorrect’ quotes it flagged were instances where Plaintiff was discussing Defendant’s brief,” they added.
The megachurch founder’s lawyers further argued that Blackburn’s latest filing on behalf of Youngblood “fabricated new quotes and misrepresented additional holdings, rulings, and cases.”
They also highlighted inconsistencies in Youngblood’s allegations about where he was sexually assaulted by Jakes.
Youngblood claimed in interviews with internet personality Larry Reid on his “Larry Reid Live” show on Oct. 28 and Nov. 3, 2024, that Jakes assaulted him when he was about 18 or 19 years old.
Youngblood claimed to Reid that he had been talking with Jakes for about two hours at the home of an older adult clergywoman, where he was staying during a local church revival approximately 40 years ago, when Jakes allegedly tried to kiss him.
“After sitting there and having this long discourse with him, I finally looked at my watch, and I’m like, ‘Oh my goodness, I got to go. I got to get this car back to my mother. She’s gonna kill me.’ So I said to bishop, ‘I got to get up,'” Youngblood recalled.
“And I got up from the table, he got up from the table, he walked around toward the way I had to exit quicker than I got over there, and when I started to walk past him, he pulled me to himself, wrapped his arms around me, and tried to kiss me. And in that moment, I literally died.”
The morning after the encounter, Youngblood alleges Jakes called his home and intimated that he wanted him to become a local sex partner.
“My mother answers the phone, and she says to me, ‘Duane, it’s Elder Jakes.’ Jakes and I get on that phone and when I get on that telephone, I can hear water. He is sitting in a bathtub, and in that thing, he says to me, without any hesitation, ‘there’s three things I need you to do. The first one is, when I come to Pittsburgh, you’re going to be the only person I sleep with. The second one is, you can’t sleep with anybody else because I don’t want to give my wife anything. And thirdly, I will take care of you the rest of your life,'” Youngblood alleged.
Days after making those allegations public, Jakes’ attorneys said an attorney representing Youngblood had sent a demand letter to Jakes on Nov. 24 demanding $6 million “to ‘resolve this matter quickly and privately;’ otherwise, Youngblood would bring a lawsuit against Bishop Jakes for sexual assault and harassment.”
“Defendant—for the first time—claims that the attempted sexual assault story he told on Larry Reid Live, which forms the basis for the defamation and conspiracy claims in this case, occurred not in the dining room of a home, but rather ‘during that drive’ and ‘inside the car,’” Jakes’ lawyers noted.
Indeed, Blackburn’s filing on behalf of Youngblood states:
In short, beyond a blanket denial, Plaintiff’s Opposition never confronts—much less contradicts—the specific building-block facts of Youngblood’s account: that (1) Youngblood was a teenager at the time; (2) Bishop Jakes first encountered him while preaching as a guest at Youngblood’s Pennsylvania church; (3) Jakes later offered “pastoral counseling”; (4) Youngblood, using his mother’s car, drove Plaintiff home after the service; and (5) during that drive, when Youngblood realized he was late returning the vehicle, Jakes hugged him, physically cornered him, and attempted to kiss him inside the car. The Opposition supplies no alternative timeline, no different venue, no witness, and no documentary contradiction—only the refrain that it never happened.
“This material change to Defendant’s story from what he said on the October 28 and November 3 LRL episodes is not only powerful evidence of falsity and a reckless disregard of the truth, but shows that he knows it is false,” Jakes’ attorneys wrote in response to Youngblood’s filing. “That is more-than sufficient for actual malice at this stage of the case.”
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