Judge Holds Tyrone Blackburn In Contempt As Fat Joe Scores Court Win
Fat Joe wins a federal contempt ruling against Tyrone Blackburn, but the judge stops short of the full sanctions the rapper's team requested.
Black News 
Fat Joe walked out of federal court with a partial win after a judge held his former hypeman’s attorney in contempt, but stopped short of the full penalties the Bronx rapper’s team had been pushing for.
U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Rochon ruled that attorney Tyrone Blackburn and his client Terrance “T.A.” Dixon are in contempt of court for skipping two court-ordered depositions scheduled for February 6 and 9, 2026.
The judge found that Blackburn told plaintiff’s counsel on February 3 he wouldn’t show up, promised to seek relief from the court that same day, then did neither.
The court reporter and videographers showed up both days.
The defendants didn’t. Fat Joe’s legal team had asked for attorneys’ fees, a referral of Blackburn to the Committee on Grievances of the Southern District of New York, and an order forcing Blackburn to serve certain filings directly on Dixon, but Judge Rochon granted only the cost reimbursement.
“Defendants are ORDERED to pay Plaintiff the reasonable costs incurred to pay the videographer and court reporter for the February 6 and 9, 2026 deposition dates,” she wrote.
The no-show fits a pattern of wild conduct that’s followed Blackburn through this entire case from the jump.
It started in summer 2025 when he was criminally indicted after allegedly reversing his car into a 66-year-old process server’s leg to avoid being handed papers.
Around that same time, Fat Joe’s team exposed that Blackburn had stuffed court filings with fake AI-generated legal citations and then blamed LexisNexis tools he wasn’t even subscribed to.
LexisNexis confirmed he was “never an authorized user or subscriber” of the platforms he cited, calling his claims “misleading and unsupported by evidence,” and he’d already been sanctioned $5,000 for the same behavior in a separate T.D. Jakes-related case.
When Blackburn skipped the February depositions, he told the court he was too ill to attend but somehow still boarded a cruise ship, insisting he’d just “lay in his cabin.”
Fat Joe’s legal team caught him filing a 254-paragraph complaint in an unrelated New Jersey case on the exact same day he claimed to be medically incapacitated, and they caught him filing documents in three separate federal cases on the day he claimed he had no internet access from the ship.
When Blackburn did eventually sit for his own deposition on March 6, he told opposing counsel he’d taken eight medications that morning including narcotics, saying, “The medication and the local anesthesia does funny things that I don’t know. It’s messing my head up.”
He then answered questions for over an hour anyway.
But it was the February 24 deposition that went completely off the rails when Blackburn mocked opposing counsel’s appearance mid-session and asked, “What date is your transition surgery?” before later blaming those remarks on medication too, issuing an on-the-record apology and saying it “was not my intention to offend him in any way.”
He’d also told the same attorney, “You’d never do this if it was outside. So watch your mouth and watch how you speak to me,” while Dixon chimed in, “I could take you down with my left hand.”
The underlying dispute traces back to Dixon’s original $20 million lawsuit, which leveled explosive allegations against Fat Joe that Dixon has since quietly walked back in an amended filing.
The original charges included RICO violations, statutory rape and trafficking claims, all of which are now gone, with Dixon currently pursuing forced labor, wage theft, copyright infringement and fraud and claiming at least $600,000 in unpaid wages from 2005 to 2020.
Fat Joe set the tone early and never blinked.
“The time of lawyers using their law license as a badge to extort people and destroy families with no evidence is over. I’m not the one,” he said after Blackburn’s arrest last summer.
Blackburn now have 10 days from receiving the invoices to reimburse Fat Joe’s deposition costs.
