Dina Lohan is allegedly having her lawyers draft a bitter, nasty letter to the creators of Glee, who on Wednesday night's episode apparently mocked her daughter Lindsay by saying "Linsday is totally crazy" and "Lindsay has been to rehab 5 times." She explained: "“Our lawyers are sending a letter” to 'Glee' on the grounds that the show allegedly defamed the actress who, by all accounts, is working hard on her recovery." A rep for Lohan adds, “Lindsay has an issue that millions of people around the world are dealing with yet ‘Glee’ is treating addiction as a laughing matter.”
Um... what do you think the creators of Glee and their lawyers are going to do with said letter? Treat it seriously and publicly recant? There's no defamation claim here whatsoever. Any celebrity who's intelligent and took a 5-minute crash course would know that.
My point of bringing this up is that I'm curious about the lawyers sending out this letter. In an ideal universe, they would look her in the eye and tell her she's making an ass of herself. In the 2nd-most ideal universe, they would draft a letter explaining the harm caused and courteously requesting that Glee apologize and stop future assaults on her character. But the first makes no money and the second is something Dina could presumably do herself, so the lawyers have every incentive to claim a highfalutin legal cause of action, defamation.
This sort of civil-lawyers-as-belligerent-bulldogs nonsense, especially when employed by public figures is one of the reasons why people hate attorneys. In some jurisdictions, a lawyer can face criminal extortion charges for making meritless legal demands. Maybe that's too far, but certainly the bar associations could be more aggressive in regulating this type of behavior, as it does impugn the profession as a whole to have attorneys sending out letters with no plausible claim behind them. Like in the U.K. (although I think this situation would probably also trigger action in the U.S.)
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