Tyler Perry Accuser Derek Dixon Speaks

Actor Derek Dixon says the process of bringing his recent bombshell lawsuit for sexual harassment and assault against Atlanta entertainment mogul Tyler Perry has been “terrifying.” But in his first interview since filing the $260 million claim against Perry in Los Angeles Superior Court on June 13, he says he felt compelled to speak out because, “I couldn’t just let him get away with this.”

“Everyone deserves to go to work and do their job without their boss trying to have sex with them,” Dixon says. “My goal is to help ensure that the next generation of actors and creatives don’t have to choose between their dreams and their dignity.”

Dixon, an actor in his late 30s who appeared in 85 episodes of Perry’s BET series The Oval that aired between 2021 and 2025, alleges in the lawsuit that Perry made several unwanted sexual advances toward him, including one in which the producer pinned him against a wall and groped him and another in which Perry snuck into his bed. Dixon has accused Perry of engaging in a pattern of exploiting male actors in his productions and using his power in the entertainment industry to harass employees.

In a statement, Matthew Boyd, a lawyer for the 55-year-old mogul, called Dixon an “individual who got close to Tyler Perry for what now appears to be nothing more than setting up a scam.” “Tyler will not be shaken down and we are confident these fabricated claims of harassment will fail,” Boyd said.

Dixon, who answered The Hollywood Reporter’s questions by email, described first meeting Perry in Atlanta in September of 2019 when he was working as an event coordinator for a company, Legendary Events, that was organizing the opening party for Tyler Perry Studios. At the time, Dixon, who was sporadically acting and writing in theater in Atlanta, says he knew Perry only as the creator of the Madea movies. Dixon says that Perry singled him out in the crowd of event staff and asked him to get on stage so he could check the lighting and then asked Dixon if he was an actor. “I said, ‘Yes, but not really right now,’” Dixon says. “And he said, ‘Yes you are. I can tell.’” At the end of the event, Perry and Dixon exchanged numbers, and Perry began texting Dixon the next day, asking, “So who are you? What’s the dream? What do you want to do?”

Perry offered Dixon the opportunity to audition for the part of a character named Dale in his series Ruthless, a spinoff of the White House-set drama The Oval created under Perry’s overall deal with Viacom/CBS. Perry ultimately cast Dixon in the part, telling him it was a small role that could get a lot bigger.

At that point, Dixon, who is an out gay man, “did not know that Perry was interested in men or that he was looking for a sexual relationship,” Dixon’s complaint says. About a year after this, in December of 2020, Perry would announce on Instagram that he and his longtime girlfriend, Gelila Bekele, with whom he shares a now 10-year-old son, had broken up.

“I’m not going to speak for him on how he identifies sexually,” says Dixon. “Regardless of his sexual orientation or gender, he should not be speaking to any of his employees whether they be men or women, gay, straight or bisexual about their sexual preferences, how often they’re having sex and physically assaulting them.”

Dixon grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina and decided he wanted to be an actor after appearing in his first play in his freshman year of high school. He studied acting at Marymount Manhattan College and The Terry Schreiber Studio in New York, performed in plays in Atlanta, and won a Georgia playwriting award. Prior to working at the events company, he mostly made his living as a waiter or bartender while trying to build his acting career.

In January of 2020, as Dixon outlines in his complaint, Perry invited him to his home in Douglasville County, Georgia. Both men drank alcohol, and Perry told Dixon he was too inebriated to drive home and should stay in the guest house. After Dixon went to bed in the guest house, he says, “[Perry] climbed into bed with me and began rubbing my thigh. I immediately jumped out of the bed and said, ‘I’m not that sexual’ and stood up until he left the room. I thought that my reaction made it clear that night that I was not interested.”

After that encounter, Perry called or texted Dixon every day, Dixon says, and Dixon ignored him. “Derek. Why don’t you text me more?” reads one text included in Dixon’s complaint. After a few days, Perry texted saying he wanted to expand Dixon’s small role of Dale on Ruthless to be a recurring character on The Oval. It was the kind of career opportunity Dixon had been waiting for.

Dixon read that his character would be shot four times in the chest at the end of the season and assumed he would be killed off. When he asked Perry about that storyline on a phone call, Dixon claims, “He said that if I did a good job, I’d probably survive.” On this same call, Dixon says, Perry also told him that “nobody gives him anything.” “He gives and gives, nobody ever gives back,” Dixon said. “I remember feeling my stomach drop when he said this. I knew that I couldn’t piss him off or my character could easily just stay dead.”

After he delivered the good news about Dale, Perry’s calls and texts increased exponentially, Dixon alleges in the lawsuit. “It was always personal and almost never about business,” Dixon says. “He would say ‘send pics’ of what I was doing or ask to see a photo shoot that I just did.” If Dixon didn’t answer immediately, he says, Perry would get annoyed. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, production on The Oval was delayed, and Perry encouraged Dixon to use the time to write a comedy pilot. Dixon did and shared the script. “He called me and told me that it was hilarious, and he loved it and wanted to shoot the pilot for it,” Dixon says. “I couldn’t believe he actually liked it, much less wanted to shoot the pilot for it. It was one of the best things to ever happen to me at the time.”

The details and dates of when this pilot was going to happen stayed murky but Dixon was thrilled and grateful. He thought that Perry understood, after their guest house encounter, that there was not going to be a sexual relationship between the two of them. “There were times when I was around him and nothing would happen,” Dixon says. “So I thought he got the picture, and that created a false sense of security.” Dixon believes that his excitement about his career — and fear of Perry’s power — led him to ignore certain warning signs. “I now realize I let my gratefulness for what he’d done for me cloud my self-respect,” Dixon says. Dixon says because he had never worked in a corporate environment, he didn’t fully clock the professional inappropriateness of the text messages Perry began to send. Texts from Perry included in Dixon’s complaint show the entertainment mogul commenting on Dixon’s “thick” body, asking “Why do you twist your hips when you walk?” and noting that Dixon “liked being choked” after shooting a choking scene on the show. In one text, Perry told Dixon he needed to “let someone hold you and make love to you.”

One day on set, Dixon says, Perry asked him to come to his trailer for a drink. “I knew I had to,” Dixon says. “We all were living at Tyler Perry Studios, working for Tyler Perry — who was the producer, writer, and director — and I understood that you do what Tyler Perry says, and you go where he demands. I felt like if you were invited and you cared at all about your career and staying on the show, you couldn’t say no.” Perry had his assistant bring them margaritas in the trailer, Dixon says. He claims in his complaint that Perry began asking uncomfortable questions, including whether Dixon was attracted to him. Dixon tells THR he continued to deflect Perry’s interest, telling him that he wasn’t “that sexual,” that he wasn’t “looking for anything.” When he left, they hugged and Perry pushed him against the wall and grabbed his buttocks, Dixon says. “After he would do things like that, he would say things like, ‘We need to just be business. We need to just be professional,’ and I would think, ‘Great. Yes.’ Every time I thought it would stop.”

The texting continued, however, with Perry often sending messages while drunk and seeming to get angry when Dixon didn’t answer. “Derek,” he said in one text that appears in the complaint. “Don’t you dare ignore me. I deserve better. I deserve attention all the time.” “What’s it going to take for you to have guiltless sex?” reads another text. “Have you found that yet in therapy?” Dixon says he started having insomnia and stomach issues, and his doctor prescribed him Zoloft, an antidepressant. After weeks of unreciprocated sexual innuendos, Perry lashed out at Dixon on set, the complaint alleges, asking if he needed to “punch [Dixon] in the stomach,” for Dixon to deliver the performance he wanted. 

In June of 2021, according to Dixon’s complaint, Perry invited Dixon to his house, ostensibly to discuss Dixon’s pilot, Losing It. “I was worried but I knew I had to go,” Dixon says. “I thought if he tried anything again, I could handle it and de-escalate it like I usually did.” Instead, Dixon says, he and Perry got drunk and Perry told Dixon to sleep in the guest house again. “He told me to give him a goodnight hug and as I did, he abruptly and forcefully pulled down my underwear and groped my bare ass,” Dixon says of one the most damning allegations in his complaint. “When I tried to pull my underwear back up, he grabbed my wrists to keep me from putting them back on. I couldn’t believe what was happening.”

Dixon believed that he was about to be raped. “I told him ‘No,’ ‘Stop,’ and ‘I don’t want this,’” Dixon says, detailing the incident described in the lawsuit. “But he wasn’t stopping. He just told me to relax and let it happen and that he wasn’t going to hurt me.” Perry’s estate, which has a guard and gate, is located “in the middle of nowhere,” Dixon says. “An Uber cannot drive to the guest house.” To defuse the situation, Dixon says, he told Perry he couldn’t do anything sexual because he was hungry, which sent Perry off to get a pizza. They ate the pizza back in the living room, then Dixon returned to the guest house, locked himself in the bathroom and fell asleep on the floor.

In the following days, Dixon says he contacted a lawyer, not the one representing him now, Jonathan Delshad, but another, who told him he’d need to quit The Oval if he was going to file a complaint. “All those years of trying to be an actor would just go up in smoke,” Dixon said. “This is not a normal job. You can’t just go out and easily get another series regular role on a TV show.” Dixon told a co-worker what happened, and they reminded him what he’d be giving up if he complained. Dixon felt paralyzed. “I was too afraid to come forward,” he says. “I knew it would be awful. And I was right.”

Over the next several months, Dixon says he avoided Perry, declining an invitation for a yacht trip. Someone from Perry’s production company reached out and said they wanted to shoot the pilot soon, and Perry’s attorneys called and told Dixon he was getting a raise but not to tell his other castmates because he was the only one. Dixon decided to stay quiet, hoping the pilot would be a success and he could find work elsewhere in the entertainment industry. Perry shot Dixon’s pilot in March of 2022. What Dixon didn’t know at the time, he alleges in the complaint, was that Perry’s contract with Viacom prohibited him from shopping the show for two years (Perry declined to comment on the deal). “I believe he was trying to dangle my dreams in front of me for as long as he could to prevent me from talking,” Dixon says. In January of 2023, after finishing another season of The Oval, Dixon moved to Santa Monica, hoping to put physical distance between himself and Perry and waiting for Perry to sell the pilot.

In December of 2023, Christian Keyes, another actor who worked for Perry prior to Dixon’s employment, went on Instagram live detailing his abusive experience with an anonymous “black Hollywood billionaire,” which Dixon believes to be a reference to Perry. Keyes’ manager has not returned a request for comment.

In June of 2024, Dixon filed a sexual harassment complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and quit his job working on the last season of The Oval, for which he was under contract to make close to $400,000. The EEOC complaint is currently pending. “I was an employee, and he was my boss,” Dixon says, of what motivated him to file the complaint. “The fact that I’m an actor doesn’t make me any less an employee. For a long time, I convinced myself that it was part of the industry, or that somehow I had to accept it to keep working. But eventually, I couldn’t stay silent anymore.”

In the weeks since his lawsuit became public, Dixon says he has received a mix of responses, from online threats and harassment to messages of support to stories of other people who say they have had similar experiences with Perry. “This is why people, especially men, don’t come forward,” Dixon says, of the harassment.

Asked if he attempted to reach a private settlement with Perry prior to filing his lawsuit last month, Dixon says, “There are always attempts to resolve situations like this privately, but they never result in the type of change necessary to protect further victims. At the end of the day my absolute fear is that he will be able to continue doing this without any major consequences.”