Actress loses lawsuit against IMDb for revealing that she is hideously middle-aged
Following the example of Hollywood producers and men who value not being turned to stone, a federal jury has rejected the actress who filed a lawsuit against IMDb, after the online database exposed her true age to an industry with little use for the middle-aged, save perhaps as prop cadavers on CSI. Huong Hoang—better known by her stage name “Junie Hoang” (as in “Good lord, could this wizened specimen, ostensibly unearthed from a hundred years’ sleep in a salt cellar, be Methusaleh himself? Oh wait… It’s only Junie Hoang”)—had originally sought $1 million in damages, claiming the site had all but ended her acting career by revealing her to be 41 years old and somehow not yet humanely euthanized. Unfortunately, Hoang’s case was complicated by her being unable to offer any sort of proof that the site had directly stood in the way of her success—especially given that her roles to that point included films such as Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver and Hoodrats 2: Hoodrat Warriors.
But besides the jury’s obvious, prejudicial belief that the Gingerdead Man and Hoodrats franchises should belong solely to the young, Hoang was also thwarted by the fact that she was, essentially, suing for her right to lie, and masquerade as a Hoodrat far past the point of reason. As previously reported, Hoang began her relationship with IMDb by supplying the false birth year of 1978, only to ask IMDb to remove it as her fake 30th birthday approached and, with it, the encroaching end to her fake youth. When she then challenged the site to check its records to see if it could prove her fake information was correct, IMDb did her one better with a public records search to find her actual birthday, then posted it as a warning to all who would dare mock the inescapable certainty of time and online movie databases.
Ultimately, the jury agreed with IMDb that it wasn’t in breach of contract, as Hoang argued, just because it had maintained accurate information about its clients, no matter how horrifying. And yet, while Hoang has failed in her attempt to stand up for one’s right to online privacy after you realize it’s your only hope to salvage the lie you yourself perpetrated, she’s definitely highlighted Hollywood’s rampant discrimination against actresses of a certain age who aren’t very good. Bravely, she says she will continue acting, with upcoming roles in movies like Pretty Perfect—presumably as an old person who is obviously neither.