SIDEBAR

• Kevin Hart’s former assistant Miesha Shakes has identified both Hart and Montia Sabbag, the woman involved in his 2017 Las Vegas sex tape controversy, as potential witnesses in Hart’s lawsuit against her.
• Hart says Shakes violated a paid non-disclosure agreement and defamed him during her interview with blogger Tasha K, while Shakes argues the agreement should not be enforced.
• The old Sabbag litigation was dismissed without a trial on the truth of her allegations, meaning the court never actually decided whether Hart participated in secretly recording the encounter.

By Samuel López | USA Herald

LOS ANGELES — Kevin Hart’s years-old Las Vegas sex tape controversy may be headed somewhere Hart almost certainly never wanted to see it again — into a courtroom, in front of witnesses, lawyers and potentially a jury.

The twist is that Montia Sabbag is not suing Hart again.

Instead, Hart’s former personal assistant, Miesha Shakes, wants Sabbag as a witness in the comedian’s own lawsuit against Shakes. Shakes also plans to testify herself and has listed Hart as a witness, according to recently reported court filings.

The pending Los Angeles Superior Court action is Kevin Hart, et al. v. Miesha Shakes, et al., Case No. 23STCV31516. Hart and K. Hart Enterprises filed the action in December 2023 after Shakes sat for a lengthy interview with internet personality Latasha ‘Tasha K’ Kebe. Hart's operative complaint asserted claims including breach of contract, invasion of privacy and defamation.

The litigation was temporarily dismissed in June 2025 over what appeared to be a missing procedural declaration, but Judge Holly J. Fujie reversed that dismissal on July 7, 2025 after Hart's counsel established that the declaration had, in fact, already been filed. The claims against Shakes returned to the calendar.

The Tasha K portion of the litigation was separately settled. The Shakes dispute was not. Hart's attorney Stacey Knoxlater told the court that the parties had been unable to resolve their differences and that litigation against Shakes would continue.

That is the case now threatening to reopen one of the most damaging episodes of Hart's career.

Shakes worked for Hart between 2017 and 2020. When that employment relationship ended, she signed a Mutual Release and Non-Disclosure Agreement.

The document itself is unusually important evidence.

It opens with a warning in capital letters — “THIS AGREEMENT AFFECTS YOUR RIGHTS — READ CAREFULLY BEFORE SIGNING.” Under the agreement, Hart was to arrange 36 months of health-insurance coverage for Shakes and provide $30,000 per year for three years, among other consideration.

Hart now says he performed.

In a declaration filed in the case, Hart said payments made for Shakes eventually totaled $102,975. He maintains that Shakes accepted what she was owed and then violated the NDA by disclosing confidential personal and business information during the Tasha K interview. Hart is seeking, among other relief, roughly $50,000 tied to the alleged contractual breach.

Shakes tells a very different story.

She has contended that Hart did not fully perform the agreement, particularly with respect to promised health benefits. She has also described suffering significant mental-health difficulties and financial distress when she signed it.

In a sworn declaration previously filed in the litigation, Shakes said she was dealing with “significant mental health issues” and was financially distressed because she was unemployed.

That defense deserves closer attention than much of the celebrity coverage has given it.

Simply saying that a person was experiencing mental-health problems when a contract was signed does not automatically erase the contract. California law distinguishes between someone entirely without contractual understanding and someone whose mental condition may make an agreement subject to rescission. Civil Code sections 38 and 39 address contractual capacity, while section 1689 permits rescission in circumstances including duress, fraud or undue influence. California's undue-influence statute also looks at whether someone exploited another person's weakness, necessity or distress to obtain an unfair advantage.

That creates a much harder evidentiary question than “Was Shakes struggling emotionally?”

The real question is what her condition was when she executed the agreement, whether it actually impaired her ability to understand what she was signing, whether Hart knew of and exploited that condition, and whether the agreement was supported by the consideration Hart promised.

Shakes' current performance as a self-represented litigant does not legally prove what her mental condition was six years ago. But it could complicate the picture she presents to a jury.

She has been representing herself, preparing trial materials, identifying witnesses and, according to the filings reviewed for this report, preparing an opening statement explaining what she intends to prove. Filing a written opening statement before trial is unusual. Yet the filing is organized enough to show that Shakes understands the basic factual theory she intends to present and how particular witnesses fit into it.

That does not prove contractual capacity in 2020. It does, however, make the evidence surrounding her claimed incapacity especially important. A jury should expect both sides to focus heavily on contemporaneous medical evidence, communications surrounding the agreement, negotiations, payments and whether Shakes had an opportunity to review the document before signing it.

Hart already survived an earlier attempt to knock out the contract claim. Judge Fujie ruled in November 2024 that competing declarations created a factual dispute over Hart's performance. The judge emphasized that Shakes did not deny executing the NDA, while Hart declared that he had paid what he owed. The court allowed the breach-of-contract claim to continue.

That was not a finding that Hart ultimately wins. It meant his claim had enough legal and evidentiary support to survive that stage of the litigation.

The same ruling dramatically narrowed another part of Hart's case.

Hart originally alleged civil extortion arising from a claimed $250,000 demand made before publication of the Tasha K interview. According to Hart's complaint, a person associated with Kebe contacted Hart's representatives and said the interview could damage his reputation unless he paid what the lawsuit characterized as a $250,000 “ransom.”

Hart did not pay.

His attorneys sent a cease-and-desist demand and reported the situation to police. The interview eventually appeared online behind a paid subscription.

Hart's complaint also pointed to language from a promotional video in which Kebe said, “When you don't pay, we have to get money by any means necessary.”

That sentence is likely to remain significant evidence in telling the jury how this litigation started, even though Hart's civil-extortion cause of action itself did not survive.

Judge Fujie concluded that the pleaded civil-extortion theory failed as a matter of California law. The judge did not rule that no $250,000 demand occurred. Rather, the court determined that threatening publication of allegedly defamatory or private material did not support the specific civil cause of action Hart had pleaded under the authorities before the court.

That is an important difference.

The dispute then reaches backward to Las Vegas.

In 2017, Hart had a sexual encounter with Sabbag while he was married and his wife was pregnant. Video of Hart and Sabbag surfaced publicly. Sabbag consistently maintained she did not consent to being recorded.

In 2019, she sued Hart and others for $60 million in federal court in the Central District of California in Montia Sabbag v. Kevin Hart, et al., Case No. 2:19-cv-07999.

The federal litigation was ultimately dismissed without prejudice in 2020 because the court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction. Judge Percy Anderson expressly gave Sabbag an opportunity to pursue her claims in state court. That dismissal was procedural — not a judicial finding that Sabbag's accusations against Hart were false.

Sabbag did exactly that.

She filed Montia Sabbag v. Kevin Hart, et al., Los Angeles Superior Court Case No. 20STCV16533. That state case eventually was dismissed without prejudice in June 2023 after neither Sabbag nor her attorney appeared for a final status conference. Judge Shirley Watkins later denied Sabbag's motion to reinstate the case in February 2024.

So, it is inaccurate to describe the Sabbag litigation simply as Hart proving his innocence and ‘winning, the sex-tape case.

Hart succeeded in getting out of the litigation. But neither the federal dismissal nor the later state dismissal resulted in a trial finding that Hart secretly recorded Sabbag — or that he did not.

That unresolved factual history is precisely why Sabbag could be an explosive witness for Shakes.

Shakes apparently wants to question her about what happened in Las Vegas and about the investigation that followed. Shakes has argued that Hart cannot attribute damage to his reputation entirely to her interview because Hart's reputation had already been affected by his own highly publicized controversies.

That theory makes Sabbag potentially relevant to damages.

It does not mean the judge will permit Shakes to retry the entire sex-tape case.

Hart has substantial grounds to object.

His attorneys could argue before trial that Sabbag's allegations would create a sideshow over events from 2017, confuse the issues, consume substantial court time and unfairly prejudice the jury against Hart. A motion in limine could ask the court either to exclude Sabbag completely or sharply restrict what Shakes may ask her.

California Evidence Code section 352 gives trial judges broad authority to exclude evidence when its probative value is substantially outweighed by risks including undue prejudice, confusion or excessive consumption of time.

The critical question would be relevance.

If Hart claims Shakes' statements damaged his reputation, Shakes can reasonably argue that the condition of Hart's reputation before her interview is relevant to causation and damages. But proving that Hart was already associated publicly with a sex-tape controversy is one thing. Calling Sabbag to relitigate whether Hart participated in secretly recording the encounter is something much broader.

The judge could permit the former and bar the latter.

Hart himself presents a different challenge.

Because Shakes is representing herself, she would personally question Hart if he is called as an adverse witness. That would put the comedian in the unusual position of answering questions directly from the former employee he is suing.

The courtroom could therefore become far more unpredictable than the simple NDA case Hart originally filed.

Shakes can question witnesses. Hart can object. The judge can limit questions, exclude irrelevant evidence and prevent the proceeding from becoming a trial over every accusation ever made against him.

Pretrial meet-and-confer obligations, evidentiary disputes and reported media-access issues are therefore more than administrative housekeeping. They may determine how much of Hart's past the public actually hears.

And Shakes' decision to list Sabbag tells us something important about her trial strategy.

She does not appear prepared merely to deny that she violated an NDA.

She appears prepared to attack causation, damages, contractual enforceability and Hart's account of events by placing his own history before the jury.

Hart, meanwhile, has something Shakes cannot easily dismiss — a signed agreement, a contractual warning telling her to read it carefully, evidence of substantial payments, and a prior ruling finding enough merit in his contract claim to keep the lawsuit alive.

That makes Hart's remaining case potentially substantial.

But if the courtroom door opens wide enough for Sabbag, Hart may find himself proving considerably more than whether a former assistant kept a promise.

He may once again have to answer questions about Las Vegas.

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