Courtney Love’s tweets lead to landmark court battle

COURTNEY Love was very upset.

The firebrand rocker had been locked in a dispute with Dawn Simorangkir, a fashion designer who was demanding payment for a few thousand dollars worth of clothes.

So on March 17, 2009, Love took to her Twitter account and began hurling a stream of insults at the designer known as the “Boudoir Queen”. Love’s tweets, which instantly landed in the Twitter feeds of her 40,000 or so followers (and countless others via re-tweets), announced that Simorangkir was a drug-pushing prostitute with a history of assault and battery who lost custody of her own child and capitalised on Love’s fame before stealing from her. !

That tirade, along with others the Hole frontwoman unleashed on social media platforms including MySpace and Etsy.com form the basis of a groundbreaking lawsuit headed to court in Los Angeles on January 18 — the first high-profile defamation trial over a celebrity’s comments on Twitter.

“There has never been anything like this case before,” says Simorangkir attorney Bryan Freedman, who claims Love’s false statements destroyed his client’s fashion career, thus entitling her to potentially millions of dollars in damages.

The case raises the question of whether celebrities, like the news media, should be liable for what happens if they intentionally put untrue and damaging statements in front of their loyal readers.

“We don’t believe there’s any defamation, and even if there were defamatory statements, there was no damage,” says James Janowitz, Love’s attorney.

A key to the case, say First Amendment lawyers, could be whether an average Twitter user would interpret Love’s vicious tweets as facts rather than opinion.

“I’ll be interested to see if the court gives people posting on Twitter more latitude than other media,” says Alonzo Wickers, a defamation expert. “The way Twitter is evolving, it seems to be more of a means to express opinion. I would hope courts give tweets the same latitude as they do an op-ed piece or a letter to the editor.”