Mariah Carey has won a long-running lawsuit alleging she defamed her brother in her bestselling 2020 memoir. The Meaning of Mariah Carey.
In a court order dated Monday, October 19, obtained and first reported by BillboardA judge has ruled that Morgan Carey did not meet the requirements to sue his superstar sister over passages in her book suggesting he sold cocaine and served prison time. New York law requires that a defamation suit against a public figure must allege “actual malice,” that is, demonstrate that they willfully lied.
Related
“The Court finds that Plaintiff has not adequately pleaded actual malice on the part of Defendant,” Judge Leslie A. Stroth wrote. “Plaintiff alleged that Defendant was more concerned with the ‘commercial viability’ of her memoir than with verifying the truth of her statements, and that Defendant’s sources for such statements are anonymous and/or unverifiable. Notably, Plaintiff fails to provide evidence that Defendant made such statements with knowledge of their falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth.”
Judge Stroth ruled that the lawsuit could not move forward without meeting the true standard of malice, thus throwing it out completely. Mariah’s lawyer, John Rosenbergsaid Billboard“Ms. Carey is pleased that the Court has recognized that her memoir addresses important issues of public interest and has rejected her brother’s defamation allegations in their entirety.”
“Ms. Carey believes that the importance of the Court’s decision goes well beyond its own interests in this particular litigation,” Rosenberg added, “because it confirms that authors should be afforded broad protection when speaking out on matters of public interest.”
Morgan’s lawyer, Richard Altmansaid he plans to appeal the dismissal. “We respectfully disagree with today’s decision because it is inconsistent with prior decisions in this case,” Altman said. Billboard.
It was a long road to reach Monday’s decision. Morgan sued Mariah for the first time in 2021, a few months after The Meaning of Mariah Carey reached number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Morgan initially alleged that his sister defamed him in eight different parts of the book, including one describing a “vicious fight between my father and brother” and another that said Morgan had “sketchy contacts in the music industry.”
The first judge in the case, Justice Barbara Jaffe, dismissed many of those allegations as insufficient for a defamation case in 2022. But Justice Jaffe ruled that Morgan could move forward with two passages in the book: one in which Mariah wrote that her brother sold “powder gifts” to clubgoers in the 1980s, and another claiming he had “been in the system.”
The case then spent several years still mired in litigation, with Morgan reasserting many of its rejected claims in an amended complaint. In the meantime, Judge Jaffe retired from the bench and the trial was reassigned to Judge Stroth.
The new judge took a fresh look at the case in his opinion Monday. Focusing on the question of actual malice, which had not been the focus of Mariah’s first motion to dismiss in 2022, Judge Stroth determined that Morgan’s failure to meet that standard should ultimately doom the entire case.
Gn entert
