When Courtney Love settled her defamation lawsuit back in March, agreeing to pay $430,000 for insulting a fashion designer on Twitter, it set a landmark legal precedent—namely, the idea that anyone can now sue Courtney Love for all of the crazy shit she says. So obviously she’s been slapped with yet another lawsuit, this time from a lawyer who briefly represented her in early 2009. The San Diego firm Gordon And Holmes is seeking punitive damages for Love’s online comments following the dissolution of their professional relationship, which fell apart when Love’s attorneys asked her to maybe cool it with the drugs while it was trying to help her recover the money she believed had been stolen from Kurt Cobain’s estate.
Love, naturally, responded by firing them, then allegedly returned several months later asking them to help her again. When the firm declined, Love took to her Twitter account to allege that they’d accepted a bribe, saying, “I was fucking devastated when Rhonda J Holmes Esq of San Diego was bought off”—in her mind, just another machination of the vast network she believes has conspired to steal everything from $470 million to Kurt Cobain’s ashes from her. And because everyone takes Courtney Love’s legal advice very seriously, Holmes claims that Love’s statements have caused “significant damage” to her career, and she would like to be paid now, please.
Of course, while her original Twitter defamation case has established some precedent, since that March settlement, Love has embarked on a media blitz in which she’s begun scattering defamatory comments to the vodka-soaked breeze—talking about pulling Kelly Osbourne out of drug comas and snorting coke out of Pamela Anderson’s ass, accusing Andy Dick and Winona Ryder of getting her addicted to Benzedrine, etc.—so it could be even more difficult for a prosecutor to establish a baseline in order to delineate statements that are intended to cause damage from Love’s everyday speech patterns. After all, do you sue the clouds for raining? Do you sue the flowers for blooming? Do you sue the sun for getting so wasted that it calls you an asshole and barfs on you?