Legal

A man whose back tattoo was unwittingly photoshopped into a Cardi B album cover is once again asking a federal judge to revive his failed case against the rapper, arguing that the star “engaged in theatrics” on the witness stand and deprived him of a fair trial.
Weeks after Judge Cormac Carney ruled there had been enough evidence to support Cardi’s courtroom victory, Kevin Brophy formally requested a new trial Wednesday, seeking another chance to convince a jury that she “humiliated” him with the risqué cover of her 2016 Gangsta Bitch Music Vol. 1.

Among other things, Brophy took aim at Cardi herself, arguing that the star (real name Belcalis Almánzar) had committed “misconduct” on the witness stand by sparring with Brophy’s attorney, A. Barry Cappello.

“Almanzar repeatedly engaged in theatrics, refused to answer basic questions, impermissibly disclosed privileged and confidential settlement communications, and generally acted with total disregard and disrespect for the jury’s time and formal nature of court proceedings,” Brophy’s lawyers wrote.

Citing supposedly calm behavior when examined by her own lawyers – “a switch in demeanor that puts Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to shame” – the filing called Cardi’s testimony a “a deliberate strategy to frustrate Plaintiff’s presentation of his case and improperly influence the jury.”

Brophy sued Cardi in 2017 for millions in damages, claiming he was “devastated, humiliated and embarrassed” by the cover of Cardi’s Gangsta Bitch. The image featured the then-rising star taking a swig of a large beer, staring directly into the camera with her legs spread wide, and holding a man’s head while he appears to perform oral sex on her.

The actual man in the image was a model who had consented to the shoot, but a giant tattoo on the man’s back belonged to Brophy. Unbeknownst to Cardi, a freelance graphic designer had typed “back tattoos” into Google Image, found one that fit (Brophy’s), and Photoshopped it onto the model’s body.

Brophy’s lawsuit claimed Cardi and others involved in the cover had violated his so-called right of publicity by using his likeness without his consent, and also violated his right to privacy by casting him in a “false light” that was “highly offensive.” Cardi’s lawyers called the allegations “sheer fantasy” and “vastly overblown,” arguing that nobody would have recognized a relatively unknown man based merely on his back.

During a four-day trial in October, Cardi took the stand to defend herself. When examined by Brophy’s attorney Cappello, things repeatedly got heated between the two – so much so that at one point the Judge Carney cleared the jury, told Cappello he had “totally crossed the line,” and threatened to declare a mistrial.

At the end of the trial, the jury agreed with the superstar’s defenses, clearing Cardi of all Brophy’s claims. Brophy later asked the judge to throw out the verdict for a lack of evidence, but the judge denied that motion in December.

In addition to criticizing Cardi’s testimony, Brophy’s new motion on Wednesday also argued that his lawyers had been denied the chance to properly cross-examine the star, and that the judge had unfairly refused to let jurors hear about Cardi’s earlier defamation trial in Atlanta.

Attorneys for Cardi will have chance to file a formal response in court in the coming weeks. The star’s lawyers did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday.

Read the entire motion for a new trial here:

A federal judge says Kanye West’s lawyers need to keep trying to reach their client a little bit longer before the judge will allow the attorneys to take an unusual step: printing newspaper ads announcing they’ve dropped the embattled rapper.
In an order issued Tuesday, Judge Analisa Torres denied – for now – a request by attorneys from the law firm Greenberg Traurig to take such extraordinary measures to formally cut ties with West (who has legally changed his name to Ye). The firm says it has “exhausted all methods” of contacting the rapper, but the judge is not yet convinced.

“The court finds that GT has not provided sufficient facts to support its conclusion that personal service is impracticable,” Judge Torres wrote. “GT’s latest attempts… do not indicate diligent efforts at attempting to locate Ye.”

Greenberg, one of many law firms to cut ties with Ye in the wake of his antisemitic statements last year, has been trying for months to legally notify the rapper that its lawyers will no longer be representing him in a copyright lawsuit album over a song off Donda 2. Judge Torres already approved their withdrawal, but federal litigation rules and legal ethics require lawyers to personally serve clients with formal notice that they’ve been dropped as a client.

It’s this process that Greenberg says Kanye is evading.

In a Jan. 13 request, they argued that the star was engaged in “deliberate avoidance and obstruction,” including ditching his previous representatives and changing his phone number. Faced with that obstinance, Greenberg lawyers asked earlier this month to let them notify him by mail – or to simply print the notice in public newspapers.

“Given Ye’s public status, publication of the withdrawal order will likely garner significant media attention, resulting in broader publication and provide an even greater likelihood of apprising Ye of the Order,” the Greenberg lawyers wrote in making the unusual request.

But in Tuesday’s order, Judge Torres said she would need to see more proof that Greenberg had truly run out of options. She suggested that the firm could show that it had used databases to search for a new address, or even “hiring private investigators” to locate the star.

The judge gave the firm a Feb. 15 deadline to either successfully serve notice on Kanye – or offer more detailed proof to support the newspaper plan. Kanye’s former lawyer at Greenberg did not immediately return a request for comment. A press representative for West could not immediately be located for comment.

Actress Esme Bianco and Marilyn Manson have reached a settlement to end her sexual assault lawsuit against the rocker, one of several such cases accusing Manson of abuse.
In a filing made Tuesday in Los Angeles federal court, attorneys for both sides alerted the judge that they had “reached an agreement in principle” to “resolve” the case. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

Jay D. Ellwanger, lawyer for Bianco, confirmed to Billboard that the actress had “agreed to resolve her claims against Brian Warner and Marilyn Manson Records, Inc. in order to move on with her life and career.” An attorney for Manson, whose real name is Brian Warner, did not immediately return a request for comment.

Bianco was one of several women to accuse Manson of sexual abuse or other wrongdoing over the past two years.

Evan Rachel Wood, who began publicly dating Manson in 2007 when she was 19 and he was 39, accused him in a February 2021 Instagram post of “grooming me when I was a teenager” before he “horrifically abused me for years.” Those allegations were followed by separate lawsuits from model Ashley Morgan Smithline, former assistant Ashley Walters, and an unnamed Jane Doe accuser.

Bianco added her own lawsuit in April 2021, claiming Warner had, among other shocking allegations, “used drugs, force and threats of force to coerce sexual acts” and had “locked Ms. Bianco in the bedroom, tied her to a prayer kneeler and beat her with a whip that Mr. Warner said was utilized by the Nazis.”

Manson strongly denied the allegations, filing a motion to dismiss the case in which he accused Bianco of “cynically and dishonestly seeking to monetize and exploit the #MeToo movement.” He’s gone so far as to file a defamation lawsuit against Wood, claiming she had “secretly recruited, coordinated, and pressured prospective accusers to emerge simultaneously” with false allegations against the rocker. Wood denies the allegations and the case is pending.

Bianco’s lawsuit is the second against Manson to end in recent weeks. On Jan. 3, a federal judge dismissed Smithline’s case, citing the fact that she failed to retain a new lawyer after splitting with her old legal team last fall.

Lawyers for Latin trap star Anuel AA are heading to a Miami courthouse Tuesday to ask a judge to block his former manager Frabian Eli from selling a $4.8 million Florida mansion — the latest bizarre twist in a nasty legal battle between the “lifelong friends.”
After years of partnership amid rising stardom, the two have suddenly found themselves in an ugly divorce. Eli (full name Frabian Eli Carrion) sued in September, claiming Anuel breached their contracts by abruptly firing him last summer and owes him millions in unpaid fees. The star rapper (real name Emmanuel Gazmey Santiago) fired back with a countersuit in November, accusing Eli of stealing millions in order to “fund his own extravagant lifestyle.”

In the upcoming showdown Tuesday, the lawsuit’s messiness is on full display.

Anuel is seeking an “emergency injunction” that would bar Eli from selling a 6,000-square-foot home in Doral, Fla., worth an alleged $4.8 million — a property the star calls “one of the many illicit purchases made by Carrion using funds from the company’s bank accounts.”  Without the order, they claim Eli will sell the house in an effort to avoid paying back the money he stole.

Eli, meanwhile, says the injunction demand is baseless and the latest example of his former friend choosing to “lash out” rather than pay him his fair share of their success: “Nothing more than an attempt to divert the court, and the public monitoring this case, away from the undisputed facts of the case.”

‘Unilaterally Terminated‘

Anuel and Eli worked together for years, starting well before the Puerto Rican rapper released his 2018 debut, Real Hasta la Muerte, and won the 2019 new artist of the year award at the Billboard Latin Music Awards. Eli then managed Anuel through three subsequent albums that all topped Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, and the pair also started and operated their own record label.

But just nine months after Eli gushed about his “childhood friend” to Billboard, on Sept. 4 the manager filed a lawsuit against Anuel in Florida state court, alleging he had been “unilaterally terminated” from their shared company, despite a seven-year contract that hadn’t been set to expire until 2026. The deal allegedly entitled Eli to 10% of Anuel’s gross earnings.

In his complaint, Eli said he had been surprised by the move because he had worked tirelessly to advance the star’s career, including during Anuel’s months-long stint in prison after pleading guilty to a gun possession charge.

“That prison sentence did not stop the manager from continuing to believe in the artist and to work towards the continuation of his career, while working for the artist twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, without receiving any pay,” Eli’s lawyers wrote at the time. “Together, the manager and the artist have enjoyed enormous success in the music industry, which due to the manager’s handling of the artist’s affairs, has parlayed into a number of other successes in life.”

Read Eli’s entire lawsuit here.

‘Maliciously Exploited‘

In November, Anuel told his side of the story – and he went a lot further than simply rebutting Eli’s allegations. In his own counter-suit, the star said Eli had been terminated because he had “maliciously exploited” their friendship to “defraud” him out of millions of dollars.

Among other allegations of wrongdoing, Anuel claimed his manager had secretly taken excess money from music agreements with Sony’s The Orchard and with Kobalt; that he had stolen money set aside for tax payments; and that he had secretly made huge personal purchases with company money, like $191,000 toward a Lamborghini, more than $1 million toward jewelry, and an undisclosed sum for renting private jets for his family.

The lawsuit also claimed Eli had taken “kickbacks” in return accepting bad business deals on Anuel’s behalf. For instance, it claimed that when Eli had arranged the purchase of a Miami condo for Anuel’s parents, he had “conspired” with the realtor to pay “a higher than necessary price” in return for a personal payment from the agent.

“In complete and utter contravention of his contractual and fiduciary duties; all reasonable sense of morality; and his years long friendship with artist, which led artist to place his full trust in Carrion, Carrion …  bilked counter-plaintiffs out of millions of dollars for which they are rightfully entitled,” Anuel’s lawyers wrote at the time.

Read Anuel’s entire counter-suit here.

‘Losing Out On Millions‘

With the lawsuit and counter-suit both still in the earliest stages of litigation, Anuel threw another bomb in early December — demanding the emergency court order restraining Eli from selling the $4.8 million house in Doral. He claimed that more than $1 million in payments for the Doral house had come from company bank accounts.

In the filing, Anuel’s lawyers warned that Eli was already in “a precarious financial position” and that the property was the only asset they could find under his name. Without a court order requiring him to retain it until the lawsuit was over, the lawyers said there might be no other way for Anuel to recover the allegedly stolen money.

“Counter-plaintiffs risk being successful on its claims, and nonetheless losing out on millions of dollars because [Eli] was permitted to dispose of the property – the sole asset currently in his name – and no longer possessed sufficient assets to cover the value of harm he deliberately and calculatedly took,” they wrote in the Dec. 2 motion.

Eli’s attorneys fired back two weeks later, arguing there was no grounds for an extraordinary order like an injunction freezing the sale of a home. Anuel’s core allegations against Eli, they said, were “simply ludicrous” and “non-sensical” — meaning that he would eventually owe money to their client, not vice-versa.

“This case is really about an artist … that rose to stardom based in part on the work done by the manager, who has now chosen to lash out against the manager with falsities in response to a lawsuit which had to be filed due to the artist’s own irrational actions,” Eli’s attorneys wrote. “Instead of litigating this case on provable facts, with evidence, Anuel is trying to use a ‘kitchen sink approach’ to muddy the waters and cause as much harm as he can.”

Read the entire emergency motion and response here.

Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain is suing longtime bandmate Neal Schon for allegedly spending over $1 million on the band’s shared American Express card, including $400,000 in a single month last year.
The new allegations came months after Schon sparked the legal battle by filing his own lawsuit accusing Cain of blocking access to “critical” financial records linked to the Amex account.

In a countersuit filed last week in California state court, Cain said it was Schon’s own actions that had led to those restrictions on his access to the Amex account, including “misusing” the card to deal with his own “financial problems as a result of an extravagant lifestyle.”

“Schon’s use of the [shared] AMEX card for personal expenses created serious liquidity problems for the band, as the AMEX balance had to be paid every month, and there were insufficient revenues to pay for other expenses as Schon saddled Journey with over $1 million of his personal expenses,” Cain’s lawyers wrote in the new complaint, filed Jan. 13.

Cain’s countersuit included a number of specific allegations about Schon’s spending habits. Once given access to the band Amex, Cain says Schon promptly spent over $100,000 in January 2022. Then in March, he allegedly spent a whopping $400,000 in charges at Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City and other retailers.

At the end of a recent tour, Cain says Schon demanded suites at a Hawaiian hotel that cost north of $5,000 per night, then stayed a week longer than necessary and racked up more than $100,000 more in charges on the card.

Schon’s attorney did not immediately return a request for comment on the new allegations.

Members of Journey have been sparring in court for years. Back in 2020, Schon and Cain teamed up to file a lawsuit against former drummer Steven Smith and former bassist Ross Valory over the band’s name. And in September, former lead singer Steve Perry took legal action to stop Schon and Cain from registering federal trademarks on the names of many of the band’s biggest hits. But in both of those cases, which have since settled, Schon and Cain were on the same team.

In October, Schon and Cain finally found themselves on opposite sides of the courtroom. In his complaint, Schon said Cain had unfairly blocked access to the Amex account, “interfering” with the band’s activities and delaying payments to crew members and vendors. “This action is brought to turn the lights on, so to speak,” Schon’s lawyers wrote at the time.

But in the new countersuit, Cain told his side of the story, arguing that it was Schon’s reckless spending that was interfering with the band’s activities.

“Schon’s charges placed considerable pressure on Journey and its ability to cover normal tour expenses,” his lawyers wrote. “Schon was spending Journey’s money, and Cain is the one who was and is ultimately liable for the AMEX Account and Schon’s charges on the AMEX Card.”

In technical terms, Cain is accusing Schon of breaching his fiduciary duty to the band’s shared corporate entity, called Nomota LLC, and of unjustly enriching himself at Cain’s expense.