Lady Gaga is firing back at a music producer who claims he launched her career and is suing her for US$30.5 million.
Her lawyer said in a court filing made public on Friday the agreement at the heart of the suit was “unlawful.” Songwriter and music producer Rob Fusari filed the lawsuit on Wednesday in Manhattan against the Grammy Award-winning performer.
He said his protege and former girlfriend, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, ditched him as her career soared.
The lawsuit said they co-wrote songs such as Paparazzi and Beautiful, Dirty, Rich. Fusari also said he came up with her stage name and helped get her record deal.
According to the lawsuit, Lady Gaga and Fusari’s relationship turned romantic and then became a business partnership in May 2006, when they created a joint venture called Team Love Child LLC to promote her career. Fusari’s share was 20 percent.
But Lady Gaga’s lawyer, Charles Ortner, wrote in his response that the arrangement was “structured in such a way as to mask its true purpose — to provide to the defendants unlawful compensation for their services as unlicensed employment agents.” Ortner wrote that Fusari and his company violated statutes that prohibited them from “acting as employment agents without a license and charging Lady Gaga an unlawful fee for their purported services.” Fusari’s lawyer, Robert S. Meloni, called the claim “ludicrous.”
“Fusari is a PARTNER in the Team Love LLC with Gag and her father (through their company Mermaid),” Meloni wrote. “Rob was no more of an ‘agent’ for her than she is a Roman Catholic nun.”
In other legal news, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday that the estate of late model Anna Nicole Smith was not entitled to one cent of the more than $300 million she sought from the estate of her billionaire oil baron husband. In the latest twist in a 15-year battle over the estimated US$1.6 billion fortune left by Texan J. Howard Marshall, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with his late son, Pierce.
The husband of actress Sandra Bullock apologized on Thursday for causing her “pain and embarrassment beyond comprehension” after recent claims he cheated on her while she was filming her Oscar-winning role in The Blind Side. Jesse James, a custom motorcycle manufacturer and reality TV star who married Bullock five years ago, said he took full responsibility for his actions. But he stopped short of admitting to published allegations by a California tattoo model of a five-week affair.
Several former members of the renowned Vienna Boys’ Choir have come forward to tell of abuse by leaders in the 1980s, Der Standard newspaper reported on Wednesday.
The choir set up an emergency hotline on Friday of last week after two former singers alleged to the Austrian newspaper that they had been sexually molested.
Since then eight former choir members have come forward, the latest report said.
On the choir’s trips, a teacher would call choirboys one-by-one to the back of the bus “to question them closely about sexual experiences,” one former member, now 40, was quoted as saying by Der Standard.
The choirboys suffered huge “pressure” in the prestigious choir and “permanent humiliation,” the man said on condition of anonymity, describing the choir as a “concentration camp.”
“All the men are over 40 and were members of the Vienna Boys Choir in the 1980s or earlier,” the woman in charge of the hotline, Tina Breckwoldt, told Der Standard.
The choir’s management said in a statement to the newspaper that it aimed to bring “clarity on potential cases, justice and help for victims and avoid future abuse.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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