A jury has found Courtney Love not liable of defamation in a lawsuit brought against her by her former lawyer, Rhonda Holmes, SPIN reports.
Holmes had accused Love of making false statement about her on Twitter, which suggested that Holmes was "bought off" when she refused to represent Love against the managers of Kurt Cobain's estate. She filed the suit in May of 2011, almost a year after the initial offending Tweet.
Love claimed that she had intended the message to go only to Holmes through the direct messaging system and that when she realized it was public, she immediately took it down. After seven days of proceedings in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom, the jury ruled in Love's favor.
The verdict from the jury came early after they opted to skip their afternoon break and come to a decision. According to the report, many press outlets had already left, and the ruling was read past he normal 4:30 p.m. closing time, partly because Love had left the court, too.
Judge Michael Johnson did not wait for Love to return when he called for a decision. The verdict is the culmination of a landmark Twitter-libel lawsuit surrounding social media and defamation.
As SPIN reports, "While the 12-person jury agreed that Love's public statement was false and likely injurious to Holmes, they were not convinced that Love didn't believe it to be true. They were asked: 'Did Rhonda Holmes prove by clear and convincing evidence that Courtney Love knew it was false or doubted the truth of it?' And the answer was 'No.'"
The suit made against Love was the first libel case involving Twitter to have been brought to court. But as The Hollywood Reporter notes, her legal troubles are not over. A new defamation suit was recently brought against her by fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir over comments she made on Pinterest.
© 2024 MusicTimes.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
