Inside the Messy Court Battle Between Carrot Top and His Alleged Extortionist

The singer accused of extorting Carrot Top sent the Luxor headliner’s former legal team a video in May 2024 warning that their legal squabble was “no longer about settling.” The clip does not threaten to release a sex tape and Brian Evans doesn’t demand money in exchange for not releasing it.

The 90-second clip—published on Thursday (Sept. 24) by Page Six—has become the latest exhibit in a Florida court fight that lawyers for Carrot Top (real name: Scott Thompson) say has dogged him for years.

“At some point, things are no longer about settling, okay?” Evans says on the recording.

In the video, Evans—who opened two shows for Carrot Top, one in 2014 and one in 2015—boasts of a different case he says he spent 12 years fighting.

“I know how to file, and I know how to respond, and I especially know how to promote,” he says. “So this is all up to you, all of you. You’re on the wrong side of this… But if this is the way you want it, this is the way it’ll be.”

Why the Tape Matters

Thompson’s lawyers say the tape matters because of later emails, a Broward County filing, and a police report.

That report, dated Sept. 3, 2026, comes from Florida’s Lake Mary Police Department. Thompson attorney Ronnie Bitman told officers that Evans claimed to hold a USB with “sensitive contents of an explicit video about the client,” wanted $500,000, and said he would send the file to the tabloids if Thompson refused.

Police logged it as “information only—extortion of client.” Thompson was not present and lives outside the city’s jurisdiction. The officer said the comedian would have to call police where he lives.

The report produced no criminal charge or finding against Evans.

The same day, Bitman put a similar claim in a Broward filing: Evans was demanding “significant sums” and warning that an alleged sexually explicit recording could be placed in a public court file, where reporters could copy it. Those claims remain allegations.

Emails attached to the papers show how the numbers changed. On May 18, 2024, Evans asked for $1.925 million and said that without a deal he would sue with exhibits “including the video,” with “consequences I can not control.”

A week later, the figure was $8 million, with a promise of a press release “within the hour” of filing. By June 4 it was $530,000, plus a warning that the fight “would be national news.”

A later message offered “Path A”: $500,000 in immediately available funds to resolve claims against Thompson. If that died, Evans wrote, he would press a motion about the purported USB and expected media. In the same thread, he said he was not threatening Thompson and was not trying to “trade silence for money.” He also said that after the deadline, the half-million-dollar terms were “not an offer your client will ever see again, not even remotely close.”

Extortion Contortion?

Evans has denied extorting Thompson. He told Page Six he “never threatened, ever, to post any video anywhere in exchange for a settlement,” called the $500,000 note confidential settlement talk, and said the footage was deleted under a 2024 settlement.

He is now suing in Broward County—the complaint was filed Aug. 6, 2026—to unwind that deal. He claims psychiatric injuries after the 2023 Maui wildfires left him unable to legally consent. He also alleges Thompson once texted him unsolicited explicit footage. (That accusation has not been proven.)

The docket grew after Sept. 18, when Thompson was hospitalized in Las Vegas. His lawyers confirmed to the judge what the media had been reporting—that he was admitted following a suicide attempt.

“This is now an emergency in the most human sense,” Bitman wrote in a Sept. 20 motion, asking the court to screen Evans’s future filings so private sexual allegations cannot hit a public docket and become national news overnight.

No court has found that Evans caused Thompson’s suicide attempt.

Judges have already clipped Evans’s paperwork. In August, U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz, in a separate Southern District of Florida case, labeled him a “vexatious litigant,” citing at least 15 “serial, spurious” cases he filed in the district since 2025.

Leibowitz dismissed the case before him with prejudice and barred new filings there without prior court approval.

In Broward, Judge Shari Africk-Olefson found that Evans—acting as his own attorney—had abused emergency-motion procedure and, after Evans agreed in court, limited certain references to unrelated videos and text messages.

Thompson’s team still wants more limits: judicial sign-off before public filings about alleged private or sexual conduct, and limits on unsupervised e-filing.

The civil case against Evans remains ongoing as Thompson’s health reportedly continues to improve.