Actress Cameron Diaz has legs as pretty as her eyes. But does she have legal legs to stand on regarding mere reporting about her now-notorious topless videotape? Diaz’s legal team apparently thinks she does: They've reportedly threatened action against a trio of Websites that have written about the tape and linked to the Website believed to be selling it illegally.
According to postings on Fleshbot.com and Gawker.com, lawyers representing Diaz have sent a cease-and-desist letter to their two sites as well as to Defamer.com, all three of which are under the Gawker Media umbrella. The sites have written about the tape purporting to show Diaz topless from a shoot circa 1992, before she attracted mainstream attention as a club dancer in Jim Carrey's hit movie The Mask.
The cease-and-desist letter reportedly assailed the three sites for linking to another site said to be selling the tape and other related images illegally, and demanded all three send written acknowledgement that they've removed the links. The site hosting the tape and photos is said to be owned by John Rutter, who faces attempted extortion, grand theft, perjury, and forgery charges in Los Angeles and whom the Charlies Angels and Shrek 2 star has sued for having no legal right to sell or profit from the tape and images and for forging her signature on a model release.
The cease-and-desist demand is also said to call for the news sites to acknowledge they had no valid rights to use, distribute, publish, "or otherwise exploit the photos or video," and that anyone copying or downloading the images should either cease and desist or face litigation. The Gawker sites also said Diaz's lawyers demanded detailed accounting of any monies any such sites received from using, publishing, or other "exploitation" of the photo shoot and video, and to destroy any and all copies "in any media, whatsoever" with written confirmation sent to the legal team.
Gawker, for one, isn't exactly in a big hurry to cave in to the demands. "Hey, legal friends: there's this thing called 'reporting,' not that we're any sort of experts on it ourselves, but we see them try it at newspapers, so we know it's probably okay to report on things that are illegal," said a site writer in reply to the cease-and-desist. "Anyway, we didn't know about any of your ‘injunction’ business because, hmm, we're not psychic, and why would we?"
Fleshbot.com, too, had something to say about the cease-and-desist, beginning with the way it asked readers who might have downloaded the Diaz topless video to knock it off.
"Hey, could you do us a favor? If you happen to have downloaded that Cameron Diaz video (no, not ‘The Sweetest Thing’ – the other one) from anywhere on the Web at any point after reading about it here last week – that is, after it had already begun making the blog rounds and even after we told you it wasn't worth the effort – could you please delete it from your hard drive, rinse out your eyes with chlorine, and ask your doctor for a frontal lobotomy so you won't remember ever having seen or heard about it in the first place?" Fleshbot.com said. "We'd sure appreciate it... and so would Cameron's legal team! Thanks much!"
Defamer.com suggested that if Diaz's publicity team spent a tenth the effort on their jobs as her legal team spent on such cease-and-desist letters, "her ass would have been nominated for its tear-jerking performance in both Charlie's Angels movies."
