Judy Austin Sues Ex-Husband Emmanuel Obasi, Rita Edochie for N1 Billion Over “Lies”

Judy Austin, the Nollywood actress married to Yul Edochie, has filed a defamation suit against her ex-husband, Emmanuel Obasi (also known as Emmanuel Chukwuobasi), and veteran actress Rita Edochie, seeking N1 billion in damages over what she describes as a coordinated campaign to damage her reputation.

The suit, filed at the Abuja High Court, also demands public retractions and apologies in newspapers and across social media, along with the removal of the offending content from the internet. Proceedings are underway, with both defendants expected to respond in the coming weeks.

According to the filing, Austin is seeking N500 million each in aggravated and exemplary damages, in addition to costs and interest.

The suit centers on statements Obasi made in mid-June during an appearance on The Honest Bunch podcast, where he alleged that Austin had shown romantic interest in Edochie while the two were still married, and separately claimed he had been denied meaningful access to their two children.

Obasi appeared visibly emotional during the interview, at one point wiping his face with a white handkerchief as he described the collapse of his marriage and his estrangement from his children.

Austin rejected the allegations within days, responding first in an Instagram video and then in subsequent public statements. She said her marriage to Obasi had ended years before she ever met Edochie, and that the two men’s accounts of when the marriage dissolved did not even agree with each other.

She has maintained that she first encountered Edochie on a film set in 2016, which she said was roughly three years after her divorce from Obasi. She has credited a colleague, identified in various accounts as Sylvester Madu or Sebastian Madu, with first encouraging her toward an acting career in 2013, well before she says she knew Edochie at all.

On the question of child access, Austin has said she never restricted Obasi’s contact with their children, explaining that the two spent years in her parents’ care before she relocated them to Enugu in 2018.

Rita Edochie, Yul Edochie’s aunt and a fixture of Nollywood’s old guard, entered the dispute publicly on Obasi’s behalf shortly after his podcast appearance. She defended his right to speak about his experience, arguing that he had been unfairly criticized for airing a private grievance, and she pushed back pointedly against Austin’s marriage to her nephew, a union that has remained a source of tension within the extended Edochie family since it became public in 2022.

That earlier controversy involved Yul Edochie’s first wife, May Yul-Edochie, whose two-decade marriage to the actor collapsed after he introduced Austin as his second wife. May Edochie has pursued her own string of legal actions in the time since, including a defamation suit against her former lawyer and a separate claim against Austin over the circumstances of the marriage’s end, underscoring how frequently this extended family’s disputes have moved from social media into Nigerian courtrooms.

Austin has framed the new lawsuit as a stand she has been building toward for months, telling her ex-husband in earlier public remarks that any allegation he made would need to be proven in court “beyond a reasonable doubt.” She has also suggested, without offering documentation, that Obasi was encouraged or compensated to speak out against her, a claim Rita Edochie disputed in her own defense of him.

Public reaction in Nigeria has largely sided with Austin since the case became widely known, with many social media users framing the lawsuit as a justified response to what they see as a public smear campaign.

Others have noted that a defamation case of this size, run through the Nigerian court system, could take years to resolve and carry significant legal costs for all parties involved, regardless of the eventual outcome.

Neither Obasi nor Rita Edochie had filed a formal response with the court as of the latest update, and Yul Edochie, who has previously said he never restricted Obasi’s access to the children and urged him to address the matter directly with Austin, has not commented on the new suit.