Comedian Carrot Top was allegedly threatened with the public release of an explicit video unless he paid half a million dollars, court filings show, and the demand came just days before he was hospitalized in Las Vegas.
Scott Thompson, the red-haired prop comic who has been a fixture on the Las Vegas Strip for decades, was the target of a payment demand from musician Brian Evans, a former opening act for Thompson's Vegas show. Evans emailed Thompson's attorney, Ronnie Bitman, demanding $500,000 "in immediately available funds, in exchange for resolution of all claims against" the comedian, according to a September 3 court filing in Broward County, Florida. The filing, submitted by Bitman, alleged that Evans threatened to place a sexually explicit recording of Thompson into the public court record, stored on a USB drive, if the money did not arrive.
Thompson was hospitalized in Las Vegas after what Breitbart News reported as an apparent suicide attempt. The hospitalization came on a Friday, just days after the court filings landed. His representative, Jami Schlicher, told Page Six that Evans had been declared a "vexatious litigant" and that a judge described his filings as "serial" and "spurious."
Bitman's filing laid out the alleged extortion scheme in detail. In the court document, Bitman stated:
"Evans demands immediate payment of significant sums and states that, absent immediate payment, a sexually explicit recording [of Thompson] will be filed in the public court file so that it may be obtained and disseminated by the press and other parties."
The email Evans sent to Bitman carried a hard deadline. Evans wrote that if his terms were not met, "it is not an offer your client will ever see again, not even remotely close." He framed the demand as a resolution offer, not a threat. In the same email, Evans wrote:
"It is not a threat. I am not offering to create coverage, stop coverage, or trade silence for money. I cannot control what outlets draft after a public motion is filed. The only thing that stops coverage is if we both stop filing anything."
Evans also wrote: "I am telling you. That I would rather resolve the claims against your client than continue this motion practice." The distinction Evans drew, between an extortion threat and a litigation strategy, is the central dispute in the case.
Evans's legal activity extends well beyond the Broward County case. A September 4 filing from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida found that Evans had filed "no fewer than fifteen pro se cases in this District since 2025, all of which appear frivolous." Pro se means Evans filed the cases himself, without an attorney.
That volume of litigation helps explain why a federal judge took action. Judge Shari Africk Olefson ruled that Evans had wrongly labeled his filings as emergencies when they did not meet the requirements for that designation. In a court document, Judge Olefson wrote:
"The court finds such non-compliance to constitute an abuse of the emergency motion procedure."
Judge Olefson also granted Thompson's request to remove or seal some of Evans's filed materials, including videos, text messages, and other details that Thompson's attorneys called irrelevant to the case. Evans responded by filing a recusal request, asking the judge to step aside.
Evans's lawsuit against Thompson rests on a counter-narrative. Evans claims Thompson sent him an unsolicited video of Thompson engaging in oral sex with another person sometime in 2022 or 2023. Evans says he was "shocked, disturbed, and offended" by the footage. He also claims Thompson persuaded him to sign a settlement agreement in 2024, which Evans now wants voided. His basis for voiding the deal: he says he suffered "severe psychiatric injuries" from the 2023 Maui wildfires and was not mentally competent when he signed.
That chain of claims, an unsolicited video, a coerced settlement, wildfire-induced psychiatric harm, is what Evans says motivated his legal campaign. But the court record tells a different story about his conduct. Fifteen lawsuits in roughly a year, all deemed frivolous by a federal court, suggest a pattern that goes beyond any single grievance.
Speaking to Page Six, Evans denied ever threatening to release the video in exchange for a settlement. He said the email to Bitman was "intended to be confidential" and insisted he "never threatened, ever, to post any video anywhere in exchange for a settlement." Evans also claimed the video "was deleted a long time ago" in compliance with a previous settlement.
That claim raises its own question. If the video was deleted long ago, why did Bitman's court filing describe Evans threatening to file it from a USB drive into the public docket? The two accounts do not square, and no resolution appears in the available court record.
Evans also addressed Thompson's hospitalization. "I am sorry that Scott apparently did something to hurt himself," Evans told Page Six. "He's a great talent but these are issues he needs to deal with and move past." He added: "Scott is still young and has a big life ahead of him. It's not my intent to bring this guy down. It's the opposite. Thankfully he is still with us."
The timeline matters. On September 3, Thompson's attorney filed the extortion allegations in Broward County. On September 4, a federal court flagged Evans's fifteen frivolous lawsuits. By Thursday, a judge had sealed some of Evans's filings and found he abused emergency procedures. By Friday, Thompson was in a Las Vegas hospital.
No one outside Thompson's inner circle can say what pushed him to that point. But the court record shows a man who spent weeks, at minimum, fending off a barrage of litigation from a former colleague who demanded a half-million dollars and dangled an explicit video over his head. Whether that campaign meets the legal definition of extortion is for the courts to decide. The human toll is already visible.
When the legal system lets one person bury another in frivolous filings and explicit threats dressed up as "motion practice," the system itself becomes the weapon, and the people it is supposed to protect pay the price.
