Busta Rhymes has apparently had enough of courthouses.
The oft-arrested rapper settled a suit yesterday just one day before he was supposed to appear in Manhattan Supreme Court to try to convince Justice Emily Jane Goodman to throw out Melvin Smith’s $100,000 judgment against him.
Smith’s suit charged that Rhymes and a bodyguard beat him when he approached the rapper for an autograph in 2005.
Rhymes defaulted in the case late last year, but recently filed papers saying he didn’t know about the suit because he’d never been served with a copy of the legal papers. He said Smith’s process servers had mistakenly gone to where his five cars were registered – his ex-girlfriend’s home in Baldwin, L.I.
“While I own the property, I have no access to it,” he said.
“I was required” by court order “to provide this home for the mother of my three children, from whom I am estranged and with whom I have been embroiled in child-custody proceedings for over two years,” he said.
In the same affidavit, he insists he never assaulted Smith during their run-in at the Gramercy Deli on Park Avenue.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.