Lindsay's new (??) career in doing-anything-to-try-and-make-some-sort-of-money continues.... A result, no doubt, of A) Huge unpaid legal bills, B No meaningful work and C) No more invites to be the "hostess"
brows
for some rich guy on his yacht in Cannes...
Lindsay Lohan's Continuing Legal Troubles
Just weeks after Lindsay
Lohan narrowly escaped a Florida lawsuit over self-tanner with the help of four big-name law firms, she's heading back to court, this time as the plaintiff in a defamation and right of publicity suit. Perhaps a bit cash-strapped after the Florida debacle, LiLo's lead attorney in this suit is a solo practitioner who promises to charge "no fee unless we win." (That same attorney represented LiLo in a 2010 lawsuit against E*Trade over a Superbowl commercial that featured a boyfriend-stealing, "milkaholic" baby allegedly modeled after the actress.)
Lohan
latest legal adventure concerns a song by by
Ne-Yo and
Afrojack, "Give Me Everything," in which the aptly-named
Pitbull raps: "Hustlers move aside, so I'm tiptoein', to keep flowin', I got it locked up like Lindsay Lohan." LiLo's legal complaint, apparently drafted with excessive reliance on Thesaurus.com, alleges that "the lyrics, by virtue of [their] wide appeal, condemnation, excoriation, disparaging or defamatory statements by the defendants regarding the plaintiff are destined to do irreparable harm to the plaintiff."
Pitbull has claimed, implausibly, that the lyric at issue does not refer to LiLo's
stint up the river, but rather conveys the "positive message" that "if you got it locked up [like LiLo does], it means you run [the show.]" Um, right. In this writer's view, Pitbull's strained interpretation of the lyric can only hurt his case;
truth is an absolute defense to a claim of defamation, and
right of publicity claims are a tough sell when 1) they are premised on the content of artistic -- as opposed to purely commercial -- works, and 2) the defendant's use of the plaintiff's name or image was "fleeting and incidental," and 3) the plaintiff's name or image was used in connection with newsworthy matters. We could debate how "newsworthy" LiLo's stint in prison was, but the fact that Googling "lohan" and "prison" yields 13,600,000 results sort of speaks for itself. In other words, this could be a long rainbow with no pot of gold at the end for Lohan's lawyer.
Styleite.com
