Tiffany Haddish Pushes For Private Arbitration Of Former Friend’s $1 Million Lawsuit

Tiffany Haddish is back in the news; this time she is seeking to have the defamation case filed by a former friend be held by an arbitrator.

The $1 million defamation lawsuit was filed by her former friend Trizah Morris. Morris is the same person whose children filed and later dismissed a lawsuit against Haddish and comedian Aries Spears over a pair of skits, which depicted pedophilic behavior. According to the defamation suit, which was obtained by Radar Online, Spears, who also participated in the skits, was sued by Morris as well. Now, Haddish wants the suit to be settled by an arbitrator, outside of the public eye because she claims she had Morris sign an NDA.

The lawsuit stems from statements Haddish and Spears made publicly, which attempted to establish that Morris was an extortionist looking to gain money from the pair. Haddish says that her former friend signed an agreement containing a non-specific confidentiality clause. Still, a judge has not ruled on her motion to have evidence presented to an arbitrator.

Haddish’s attorney, Shawn Holley, described Morris previously as someone who has been attempting to besmirch Haddish’s name, saying, “Trizah Morris has been trying to assert these bogus claims against Ms. Haddish for several years. Every attorney who has initially taken on her case — and there were several — ultimately dropped the matter once it became clear that the claims were meritless and Ms. Haddish would not be shaken down. Now, Ms. Morris has her adult daughter representing herself in this lawsuit. The two of them will together face the consequences of pursuing this frivolous action.”

Morris’s lawsuit says that she has had her reputation ruined and that she has suffered damages as a result of Haddish’s public statements about her. Following the dismissal of her children’s lawsuit against Haddish and Spears in 2022, Morris’s daughter released the following statement, “My family and I have known Tiffany Haddish for many years – and we now know that she would never harm me or my brother or help anyone else do anything that could harm us. We wish Tiffany the best and are glad that we can all put this behind us.”

According to Morris’s lawsuit, Haddish used her personal history with the children–they called her Auntie Tiffany at one point–to rope them into being groomed for sexual abuse.

Haddish is no stranger to defamation lawsuits over the past few years. As Essence reported, in 2018, her ex-husband William Stewart filed a lawsuit alleging he was the victim of defamation of character when she said he abused her in her 2017 memoir The Last Black Unicorn. Stewart was never named in the book, and similar to Morris, Stewart sought $1 million in damages. The pair had a lengthy court battle that ended in 2021 after Haddish motioned Karin Crump, the Travis County judge presiding over the case, to dismiss her appeal.