Rapper Lil' Kim struck back Monday at a trial witness who helped to secure her false-statements conviction and yearlong prison sentence, filing a lawsuit accusing the witness of unlawfully using her name and image to promote a DVD.
In a lawsuit filed in US District Court in Manhattan, she accuses James ``Lil' Cease'' Lloyd of preparing to release a DVD entitled, The Chronicles of Junior M.A.F.I.A. Part II: Reloaded.
She says the DVD, like a predecessor, was unauthorized and improperly uses her name, image and likeness, amounting to false advertising and false endorsement. She's seeking US$6 million in damages.
Lil' Kim, whose real name is Kimberly Jones, was convicted after she told a grand jury that she didn't see her manager and a friend at the scene of a 2001 gunfight outside WQHT, the Manhattan rap station known as HOT 97. A man was injured in the shootout.
Lloyd and Antoine ``Banger'' Spain, Brooklyn rappers who once teamed with Lil' Kim in the Junior M.A.F.I.A., testified they saw her manager and the friend she denied seeing at the radio station with her.
Lil' Kim, 30, was the sidekick and mistress of the late Notorious B.I.G. As a solo artist, she has become known for her revealing outfits and suggestive lyrics. She won a Grammy in 2001 for her part in the hit remake of Lady Marmalade.
In closely related news, it's alleged that in the 1990s Damion ``World'' Hardy controlled the crack trade in a Brooklyn housing project with kidnappings, shootings and murder, prosecutors said.
By 2003 he was dating rapper Lil' Kim and was suspected of trading shots outside a New Jersey hotel with a bo-dyguard for rival artist 50 Cent.
The next year Hardy made a four-month religious pilgrimage to the Middle East and was arrested when he told customs agents on his return that he was ready to fight in a jihad, prosecutors said.
Hardy's bizarre, twisting and violent past led Tuesday to a 22-count
indictment charging him and a dozen
associates with a string of attacks that killed rival drug dealers and, in one case, resulted in the death of a well-known Swedish commercial director who was standing nearby.
The indictment describes Hardy as the founder and head of the Cash Money Brothers, a violent drug crew that controlled the cocaine trade in the Lafayette Gardens housing projects in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
Prosecutors rested their case Tuesday in the trial of a photographer accused of forging Hollywood star Cameron Diaz's signature on a document allowing the sale of topless pictures of the actress.
Snapper John Rutter's defense got its chance to rebut the allegations against him a day after experts testified that the Charlie's Angels star's autograph on a model release form was faked.
The photographer is accused of using the bare-breasted pictures of Diaz he snapped when she was an unknown model in 1992 in an attempt to blackmail the top Hollywood movie actress out of more than US$3 million.
A media watchdog group said on Tuesday it has demanded Take-Two Interactive Software Inc unit Rockstar Games recall Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the blockbuster title at the center of a swarm over a hack that helps players unlock a sexually explicit mini-game. The move added the Parents Television Council's voice to a growing chorus of critics of the game -- one of the most popular ever sold and one of the most controversial for what critics see as its gratuitous violence.
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