Summary: The art dealer who Madonna is fighting in court says that the Material Girl has a personal vendetta against her.
Madonna is known as the “Material Girl,” which could mean that stuff is important to her! Recently, an auction website and an art dealer found out how important when the pop icon legally blocked the sale of her items that she claimed were stolen. One of those items included a letter from the late rapper Tupac Shakur, and that letter was expected to fetch the sellers $400,000.
But while Madonna claims that the items were stolen by her former friend and art dealer Darlene Lutz, Lutz has fired back in order to clear her name. She said that she and Madonna had actually made an agreement in 2004 that Lutz owned some of Madonna’s property, and she submitted the document in court on Wednesday, according to The Daily Mail.
“Madonna is grasping at straws by arguing that the broad release does not apply because the auction at issue is taking place ‘many years’ after the Settlement Agreement, and the general release did not apply to future claims,” Lutz’s filing said.
Lutz said that she and Madonna were once friends, but their relationship had soured.
“This lawsuit is pretext for Madonna’s personal vendetta against Ms. Lutz, whom she already has sued once over a decade ago following a personal falling out,” Lutz’s attorney Judd Grossman said.
Grossman went on to say that Madonna was trying to smear Lutz, but prior to Lutz’s response, Madonna said that the issue at hand was her privacy.
“The fact that I may have attained celebrity status as a result of success in my career does not obviate my right to maintain my privacy, including with regard to highly personal items,” Madonna said in court.
Madonna said that Lutz had violated her trust and stolen her items, which include a breakup letter from Tupac. The Tupac letter was a handwritten breakup note written from prison in New York. Shakur said that he could no longer be in a relationship with Madonna because she was white and their love would hurt his rapper image. The letter was expected to fetch over $400,000.
The auction also included a personal letter that Madonna wrote to her former lover John Enos. In the letter, she described being jealous of Whitney Houston and Sharon Stone and said they were “mediocre.”
On July 18, a judge temporarily blocked the auction of almost 100 of Madonna’s things from Gotta Have Rock and Roll and Lutz, and he scheduled a formal hearing of the case for September 6.
Source: The Daily Mail