The Saga of Kesha, Dr. Luke and a Mother's Fight: 'He Almost Destroyed Us'

Kesha’s allegations against her producer, Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, have brought support from Taylor Swift and Lena Dunham, howls of protest against his major-label partner, Sony Music, and vehement denials and denunciations from Gottwald. Now, as the case winds through court, the singer’s mother, Pebe Sebert, speaks exclusively about her daughter’s 10 years as a “prisoner” under contract: “Luke almost destroyed us."

- Danielle Bacher

ON FEB. 19, KESHA ROSE Sebert sat in Manhattan’s New York State Supreme Court building, tears streaming down her cheeks. Judge Shirley Werner Kornreich had just denied a preliminary injunction that would have allowed Kesha to record music outside her six-album contract with producer Lukasz Sebastian Gottwald, better-known as Dr. Luke — and, according to a lawsuit she brought against him in October 2014, her alleged rapist.

That lawsuit not only described how Dr. Luke, now 42, drugged and raped Kesha, 29. It also claimed that Luke controlled and psychologically abused the singer from the time she moved to Los Angeles to pursue her career in 2005 through her breakthrough in 2010 and beyond. “Dr. Luke has been tyrannical and abusive since our relationship began,” Kesha, who’s represented by the high-profile attorney Mark Geragos, stated in an affidavit from September 2015. “I was too young and naive to even understand what he was doing to me.”

“She was a prisoner,” Kesha’s mother, Rosemary Patricia “Pebe” Sebert, says today. During several hours-long phone calls from Nashville, where she lives, Pebe, 60, a successful songwriter — she can be seen sitting next to a sobbing Kesha in the courtroom photo that ricocheted across news sites and social media in February — spoke exclusively to Billboard about Kesha’s 10-plus-year relationship with the Grammy-nominated producer. (Kesha declined to speak with Billboard.) “It was like someone who beats you every day and hangs you from a chain and then comes in and gives you a piece of bread. Luke would say, ‘You look nice today,’ ” says Pebe, “and send her into hysterics of happiness because she was programmed to expect nothing but abuse.”