Katy Perry Reportedly Was Afraid to Speak out in Dr. Luke Case for Fear of Backlash From Kesha’s Fans

Now that Katy Perry‘s entire deposition testimony is unsealed in music producer Dr. Luke’s defamation against Kesha, it’s now public information that Perry worried her career would take a hit if she supported or continued working with Dr. Luke.

Court documents filed Thursday and obtained by The Blast revealed Perry’s entire testimony from her July 2017 deposition with Dr. Luke’s attorneys. Certain positions of her testimony were already unsealed in recent months, including Perry saying on the record that Dr. Luke did not rape her, as Kesha claimed.

In the newly unsealed testimony, Perry said that she feared being attacked and criticized if she were to defend Dr. Luke.

“I would be attacked, I would be the one woman that is against women and I’m not against women, but I believe in innocent until proven guilty and I believe in justice,” she said.

She was also questioned about her decision to stop working with Dr. Luke, whose real name is Lukasz Gottwald, after Kesha’s sexual assault lawsuit (which Kesha has since dropped).

Perry said she was pressured to support Kesha because other pop singers had spoken out in support of her and against Dr. Luke. “I felt pressured, but I also knew both of them and a lot of people did not. So it was easy for them to be disattached and support an idea rather than an actual instance.”

“People were generally very angry at me for not saying anything,” she continued, adding that it would have been frowned upon had she continued to work with Dr. Luke on her album Witness.

“The association with working with Luke was a negative at the time and still is because of this incident,” she said.

When asked if that was because of Kesha’s sexual assault allegation, Perry replied, “Yes.”

She said that she spoke with Dr. Luke ahead of time before making the decision not to work with him on Witness, telling him that it would not be well received because it would appear as if she was “picking a side” in the lawsuit.

Perry’s testimony also revealed that she was “annoyed, pissed off that [Kesha] would bring me into it in this way, annoyed at both Luke and Kesha.” Kesha had previously asserted in text messages to singer Lady Gaga that were used as evidence in her sexual assault trial that Dr. Luke raped Perry.

“They think I was raped and I was not,” she said, referring to Kesha and Gaga.

“I want to stay out of it because I know them both [Kesha and Dr. Luke] and I empathize with both of them and obviously it’s a horrible situation for both of them. And the only two people that know what really went on are those two people,” she said.

Luke has argued in his defamation suit against Kesha that her sexual assault claims cost him upwards of $50 million, with a majority of the loss coming from not producing Perry’s future albums.

The case remains ongoing.

Photo credit: Pascal Le Segretain / Staff / Getty