The rock star adds to her social media tab.
Courtney Love has paid a high price for things she’s written on social media — at least three-quarters of a million dollars.
The rock star has ended the second defamation lawsuit brought against her by fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir by agreeing to pay her adversary $350,000. That’s on top of the $430,000 Love paid to resolve the first lawsuit.
The dispute between the two erupted more than six years ago when Love went on a rant on Twitter about how she was billed for custom clothing. Love told her followers how the designer was a drug-pushing, thieving prostitute with a history of assault and battery.
After Love paid to avoid becoming the first-ever celebrity to go to trial over tweets, she ended up back in trouble with Simorangkir after taunting the designer’s lack of followers on Pinterest and again accusing her of theft. Love talked about the earlier lawsuit on Howard Stern‘s radio show when her Twitter habits came up, and Stern admonished her, “You can’t just blurt things out.” Thus came Simorangkir’s second lawsuit.
Love ended up becoming the first celebrity to go to trial over tweets after all. That happened in a third lawsuit brought by a different plaintiff — one of her former lawyers hired to handle a potential fraud case over the management of the estate of Kurt Cobain. There, she prevailed, after telling a jury she was a “computer retard” who believed what she had written when she wrote it.
Eventually, though, she had to face the music for things she had written and said about Simorangkir.
This second case made it up to a California appeals court, where this past February, a decision to allow the lawsuit to proceed over First Amendment objections was affirmed. The appeals court compared her unfavorably to Marlon Brando, explaining that Love hadn’t demonstrated how her comments about the fashion designer were in the public interest nor presented any socially important implications.
The matter then returned to the Los Angeles Superior Court, where Simorangkir’s attorneys, Bryan Freedman and Jesse Kaplan, negotiated a resolution with Love’s attorney, Marc Gans.
