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.”
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