Commentary

Judge's mixed decision leaves Mariah Carey to defend claims in her brother's lawsuit over book

By David Baker   

   The decision by state Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe to dismiss all Morgan Carey’s claims against the publishers of Mariah Carey’s book while allowing two of the same claims against Mariah Carey to continue is puzzling; It assumes that the publishers didn’t know and couldn’t be expected to know that publishing statements accusing two people of serious crimes without, apparently, any more then a blind belief in their author might make them also liable.

   The ruling comes almost a year after the complaint that started the lawsuit was filed. Since then the defendants have spent thousands of dollars trying to get the case thrown out before it started. For the publishers, it worked - unless an appeal is filed and that part of the decision is reversed. 

   But for Mariah Carey, the case continues, first with the service on Morgan’s attorneys of an answer - a paragraph by paragraph response to the allegations in the complaint, followed by written questions, and then depositions of the plaintiff and defendant.

   It’s at her deposition that defendant Carey will have to account for accusing Morgan of being a “sometimes drug dealing, being-in-the-system, drunk-ass brother.”

   Ironically, it’s likely it wasn’t Carey who came up with that dramatic line, but rather the person she hired to actually write the memoir, Michaela Angela Davis - who last week was removed from Morgan Carey’s lawsuit. Nevertheless, it’s Mariah Carey’s book and she is responsible for everything in it. 

  That includes claiming her sister Alison gave her Valium and offered her cocaine when she was 12 years old and Alison was 20 - both accusations of serious crimes known as defamation per se, meaning that financial loss or other damage doesn’t have to be proved.

   Alison denies it ever happened and says Mariah made up the story about her brain-damaged destitute sister and fed it to the  media in a callous effort to promote her book. 

   So unless Mariah Carey has or can concoct something to support her accusation, the case will be a ‘she said, she said’ battle. Forty years later, how do you prove something didn’t happen? How does Alison prove a negative? 

   Meanwhile, Morgan’s case now moves forward, which, without a settlement, will add to the permanent public record of Mariah Carey’s totally unnecessary cruel attack on her two less fortunate siblings.

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