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Artist News Legal
Mariah Carey gets defamation lawsuit filed by her brother cut back, but not dismissed
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 17 February 2022
A New York judge has significantly cut back a defamation lawsuit filed against Mariah Carey by her brother in relation to the star’s 2020 memoir ‘The Meaning Of Mariah Carey’. However, his defamation claim in relation to allegations he sold drugs at New York clubs in the 1980s will be allowed to proceed.
Both of Carey’s siblings – Alison and Morgan – sued their sister over claims she made about them in her 2020 book. Morgan took particular issue with nine passages in the memoir which, he said, damaged his reputation and, in the process, caused a movie producer to abandon plans to adapt a screenplay he had written.
Judge Barbara Jaffe rejected most of Morgan’s defamation claims earlier this week. She concluded that passages relating to alleged drunken and violent conduct on Morgan’s part, and his alleged involvement in a murder-for-hire plot, as well as a section about time he spent in a psychiatric hospital as a child, did not sufficiently rise to the level of defamation under New York law.
However, implications that Morgan had been a drug dealer did. Mariah’s book talked about how her brother had worked in various New York bars and clubs in the 1980s. And while she says a number of positive things about her brother in that particular section, she also claimed that he “discreetly supplied the beautiful people with their powdered party favours”.
“The context reasonably permits an average reader to conclude that Carey refers in this statement to cocaine, which is a controlled substance, the possession and/or sale of which is proscribed by New York law”, judge Jaffe wrote in her ruling this week. “It thus implies that plaintiff committed a serious crime and is sufficient to support [an] action for defamation per se”.
So, Morgan’s defamation action against his sister will proceed, albeit only in relation to the drug dealing allegations.
His legal claims against the people and companies that published the book were dismissed entirely though – because, under New York law, he would need to show that they acted with “actual malice” in publishing Mariah’s claims in order to hold them liable for defamation, and his lawsuit failed to do so.
