Courtney Love Ordered To Pay $95K To Designer She Defamed On Twitter
For Courtney Love, Twitter has proven a fickle mistress this week.
Love, the eccentric widow of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain who went on to lead her own band, Hole, and gain infamy with a seemingly unending stream of oddball public statements and antics, was ordered Tuesday to pay more than $95,000 to a fashion designer she allegedly libeled on Twitter back in 2009.
Weirdly, as has befitted the public life and career of Courtney Love, on the same day another Twitter libel case brought against Love was thrown out of court.
In 2009, Courtney Love gained the dubious distinction of becoming the first public figure ever sued for libel over Twitter postings. The “Celebrity Skin” singer was in the midst of a financial dispute with designer Dawn Simorangkir, who was trying to get Courtney Love to pay up for several thousand dollars worth of clothes.
Courtney Love unleashed a vengeful rant via the then-three-year-old social media platform, in which she accused Simorangkir of prostitution, drug dealing, assault, and various other alleged transgressions. At the time, Courtney Love had about 40,000 followers on Twitter. She now has more than 280,000.
The designer responded to the Courtney Love Twitter diatribe by filing a defamation lawsuit against the rock star.
Eventually, the case was settled out of court, with Love agreeing to pay Simorangkir slightly less than $450,000 in five payments of $50,000 each. Love made the first five payments without any problem. But when the sixth payment came due in January of 2014, Courtney Love, for some reason, skipped it.
So Simorangkir took Courtney Love back to court, asking a judge to enforce the payment order — which is exactly what happened. Love was ordered to pay the full remaining amount of the earlier settlement, $95,714.20.
On the same day, in a different Los Angeles Superior Court courtroom, Courtney Love emerged victorious against her former lawyer, who sued after Love accused her on Twitter on taking a bribe in a case over the settlement of the Kurt Cobain estate.
In January of this year, the case went to a jury trial and Courtney Love prevailed, when the jury ruled that attorney Ronda Holmes was a public figure due to her representation of Love. That meant the jury had to find that Love actually knew the statement she posted in Twitter — “I was f****** devastated when Rhonda J. Holmes esq. of san diego was bought off” — was untrue at the time she tweeted it.
The jury believed Courtney Love who said that at the time, she actually believed the allegation was true.
Holmes re-filed the case after Courtney Love made statement during the trial, saying, “”I don’t think [Holmes] took a bribe.” But again, the judge Tuesday sided with Courtney Love.
