First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus tried to get Lindsay Lohan's gal pal to settle a $100,000 legal tab by threatening the Hollywood deejay with bad publicity, court papers say.
Garbus attached a draft of a breach of contract suit to an e-mail he sent Samantha Ronson in October 2007, promising he would file it if she didn't pay him for two months' work.
"Please don't force me to do it," Garbus wrote in the e-mail. "The blogs will pick it up."
Ronson's lawyers then attached the e-mail to their legal papers after Garbus filed his breach of contract suit in Manhattan Federal Court in March. That case was later dismissed.
The exchange between the high-powered New York lawyer and the hip-hop star offers a revealing glimpse behind the scenes of an ugly legal tussle expected to play out in a Los Angeles courtroom in the coming months.
Ronson is suing Garbus for malpractice, claiming he botched her defamation case against blogger Perez Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira.
A few weeks after Lohan's May 2007 arrest for driving under the influence, Lavandeira wrote that cocaine found in the car belonged to Ronson and that she had created Lohan photo ops for paparazzi.
Ronson lost that case and had to pay Lavandeira's $85,000 legal fees. She blamed Garbus for the loss and is going after him for botching the case.
Lohan has been called to testify. Last week, she asked a Los Angeles judge to prevent videotaping of her testimony - because the "Mean Girls" star fears it will be broadcast all over the Internet.
In court papers, Ronson claims Lavandeira didn't get his facts straight about the accident - and Garbus failed to discredit him.
"Had Lavandeira contacted me, requested the police report or made any investigation at all into the accident, he would have discovered that the police had found no evidence linking the cocaine to me," Ronson said in a nine-page statement in June.
She told Judge Jed Rakoff the postings had damaged her fledgling career in show business.
"I began to lose business and suffer extreme emotional distress and public condemnation," Ronson writes.
Garbus is the author of several books on First Amendment law and the Supreme Court and represented the late comic Lenny Bruce against obscenity charges.
He could not be reached for comment. via
