The American singer of Soul Smokey Robinson is targeted by a complaint, filed Tuesday in Los Angeles, of four former housekeepers who accuse the artist of the legendary Motown label of having raped them and sexually assaulted on multiple times.
One of the complainants accuses the man, 85, of having summoned him in his room, at home, before assaulting him sexually despite his opposition.
The complaint reports seven similar assaults by Smokey Robinson, author of tubes like “The Tracks of My Tears”, against this woman, between March 2023 and the moment when she felt forced to resign in February 2024.
Harassed, assaulted and raped for twelve years
Another cleaning lady accuses the singer of having assaulted him more than 20 times over a period of four years, and a third declares, in the complaint, that she was “sexually harassed, assaulted and raped” during her 12 years of work with Smokey Robinson.
The fourth person to file a complaint – they are all anonymous – says that the singer began to attack him in 2007 during a common trip to the House of Man in Las Vegas. The complaint requires at least $ 50 million in damages.
Frances Robinson, the woman of the artist accused in the complaint of letting it go, told AFP being “as shocked as you” to learn the filing of this complaint, without saying more.
Smokey Robinson, who started as a street singer in Detroit, rose to the rank of Soul icon thanks to his Sensual Falsetto and his dozens of hits that made the international renown of the Motown label.
With his group “The Miracles”, he modeled the R&B and the soul and became the main catalyst of the “Motown”, the emblematic Soul label that Berry Gordy created in Detroit in 1959, a city where Smokey Robinson was born in 1940.
In total, Smokey wrote some thousand songs, according to the Hall of Fame. 37 appear in the top 40 of the best tubes: “The tracks of my tears”, “Ooo Baby Baby” and “The Tears of A Clown”, miracles, who came at the top of the hits in 1967.
