September 10, 2025
Derek Dixon also shared texts that he says Tyler Perry sent him.
The actor suing Tyler Perry for $260 million, claiming sexual assault and harassment, said he is suffering from anxiety and depression due to Perry’s alleged advances.
Derek Dixon, who appeared in 85 episodes of Perry’s BET series The Oval between 2021 and 2025, sat down with Linsey Davis of ABC News Live on Sept. 9 to recall his complicated relationship with Perry, which allegedly included daily texts and calls and physical gropings that Dixon tried to avoid.
After filing the bombshell lawsuit against the media mogul, Dixon is hoping Perry takes “accountability for what happened” and learns to “not treat your employees this way and to never use someone’s dream to coerce them into a relationship that’s not professional.”
Speaking out for the first time since filing his civil complaint, Dixon said he didn’t “want to stay silent about it anymore” even though “it’s a vulnerable thing to talk about.”
“It’s been hard,” Dixon said. “There’s a lot of shame around it. Just trying to think what you could have done better and having to deal with the judgment of how you could’ve ended it better without being in that situation.”
Dixon was working at an events company when he met Perry in 2019. Perry took an interest in him, encouraging him to pursue acting with the promise of future opportunities. By early 2020, Dixon landed the role “he always dreamed about,” playing Dale The Oval.
In his lawsuit, Dixon claims that while working on the show, Perry began sending him text messages, some of which were sexual. In his interview with Davis, Dixon read aloud several of those texts and explained why he chose to keep the exchanges friendly despite their suggestive nature.
“One of them says, ‘What’s it going to take for you to have guiltless sex? Have y’all found that in therapy yet? I would hope that you would let someone hold and make love to you,” Dixon said.
“In all these texts, I tried to de-escalate them and make a joke out of them,” he added.
That changed in January 2020, when Perry invited Dixon to stay at his guest house over after a night of drinks.
“I got into bed and then I noticed that he climbed into bed with me as well and started rubbing my leg,” Dixon said. “I jumped out of bed…he had said, ‘Turn around so I can look at you’ and just comment on how I looked. And then he got up and left. So I thought after that instance, it was pretty clear that I was not interested in that type of a relationship.”
When Dixon’s character was shot at the end of Season 2, he feared, “If I don’t make him happy, I could stay dead on the show.” After filming the scene, Dixon said Perry invited him to his trailer and asked if he was attracted to him. Trying to defuse the moment, Dixon recalls responding that Perry was an “attractive man.”
“That’s when he pushed me up against the wall and grabbed my a** again. I remember leaving his trailer and calling my friend immediately and just feeling sick about it,” Dixon said.
In a separate alleged incident at Perry’s home in June 2021, the mogul made drinks that left them both intoxicated. Later that night, Perry allegedly invited Dixon to try out a weight monitor that required him to undress.
“He reached down and pulled my underwear down and grabbed my a** and I tried to stop him and pull back my underwear up and he grabbed my arms and said, ‘No, no, no, it’s OK, just go with it.’ I said, ‘Stop, I don’t want to be naked,’” Dixon claimed.
After ending his personal and professional relationship with Perry in 2024, as well as losing rights to a script he pitched to Perry that didn’t make it past a pilot shoot, Dixon followed up with an EEOC filing in January before filing his civil lawsuit.
As for the $260 million he’s after, Dixon said “part of that number is my lost job, my lost income, the loss of a show. The other part of that is a deterrent for how do you stop a billionaire who won’t stop themselves from doing this.”
For Dixon, justice would “look like thinking I’ve made a change and that something like this won’t happen to another actor that works for him or another actor in the industry.”
Perry’s attorney Matthew Boyd responded to Dixon’s interview.
“This is an individual who got close to Tyler Perry for what now appears to be nothing more than setting up a scam,” Boyd said. “Tyler will not be shaken down, and we are confident these fabricated claims of harassment will fail.”
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