Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee was hit with an explosive lawsuit this week accusing him of sexually assaulting a woman in the cockpit of a helicopter after Lee’s personal pilot “lured” her on the trip.
According to the complaint, first reported by TMZ, filed in Los Angeles on Friday by a Jane Doe plaintiff, Lee is accused of “forcibly groping, kissing and penetrating her with his fingers, and attempting to force her to perform oral copulation” during a helicopter flight in February 2003.
Representatives for the 61-year-old rocker did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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In the lawsuit, the woman says she met pilot David Martz the previous year when she was working as a teller at a San Diego bank he frequented. After striking up a friendship with Martz, the woman says he offered to take her for a ride on his helicopter. She eventually took Martz up on his offer and met him at a San Diego airfield for what she was told would be a sightseeing trip.
When she arrived, Jane Doe claims that Martz told her there was a last-minute change of plans and instead they would be taking Lee to Los Angeles instead. “Within a matter of minutes of being airborne, Martz pulled out alcohol he had stored in the helicopter and began to mix drinks,” the complaint continues.
After Martz asked why she was not drinking, the plaintiff alleges, he told her to “just relax” before eventually ordering her up to the cockpit to sit on Lee’s lap to get a better view. Throughout this time, she says that both Martz and Lee were snorting cocaine, drinking and smoking marijuana.
Claiming she felt “immense pressure,” she agreed to come up front only for Lee to begin to grope and kiss her. After she tried to pull away, the plaintiff alleges that Lee “became more forceful” and penetrated her with his fingers.
“Lee then pulled down his pants and attempted to force plaintiff’s head toward his genitals. By this point, plaintiff was in tears, but she had nowhere to go—she was trapped with little mobility to leave the cockpit,” the complaint adds. Martz “merely watched,” according to the complaint, and said nothing to her after dropping off Lee and flying her back to San Diego.
The plaintiff also notes that she did not speak with Martz for several years after the incident, only taking a brief call from him in 2009. The pilot died in 2015 following an aircraft accident.
Claiming the alleged sexual assault caused her “great shock, distress, humiliation, shame and guilt,” the plaintiff says she didn’t initially report it because she didn’t think the police would believe her. Since then, however, she feels that this wasn’t an isolated incident and that Martz and Lee “had a history of engaging in indecent and illegal conduct on Martz’s helicopter.”
Besides Lee, the woman has also named Mayhem Touring, Tommy Lee Inc., A Natural High Helicopters and Social Helicopters as defendants.
Martz had lost his pilot’s license three times—including after a 2009 incident in which he had oral sex with an adult film star while operating his helicopter. And before the crash that cost him his life, Martz was facing a fourth suspension after he was accused of falsifying a medical certificate following two drunk driving convictions.
Lee, meanwhile, has had his own troubles with the law over the years. Most infamously, he spent six months in jail in 1998 after pleading no contest to charges that he beat his former wife Pamela Anderson while she was holding their 2-year-old son.
