Postponed again

 A year after filing, attorneys agree to another delay

   By David Baker

   Last month the judge in Morgan Carey’s lawsuit over statements in his sister’s book “The Meaning of Mariah Carey” ordered the singer’s lawyers to serve a document called an answer by March 8.

  Evidently, three weeks was not enough time to draft and serve this routine document.

   An answer is the first response to a complaint, the document that starts a lawsuit, and is normally required to be served within 20 days of receipt of the complaint. 

   That would have been served almost a year ago. But since then the case has been delayed both by Mariah Carey’s unsuccessful attempt to get all claims against her thrown out, and by repeated agreements between lawyers for all sides to postpone deadlines.

  Now there’s a further delay: On March 4, lawyers for both remaining parties signed yet another stipulation, agreeing to move the date the answer was due from March 8 to March 22. 

   In a decision and order dated February 16 state Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe ruled that Morgan Carey had failed to show that the publishers and the book’s co-writer intended to damage him - which is called “actual malice” - and threw out all claims against them, as well as most claims against Mariah Carey.

   But the judge said the singer still must defend statements in the book that would lead readers to conclude that Morgan Carey supplied illegal drugs, and that he had been in prison.

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COMMENT   

   The publishers of Mariah Carey’s book, Henry Holt & Co. and Andy Cohen Books may or may not have avoided a legal claim; a possible appeal could reverse the judge’s decision to dismiss all claims against them. But morally, surely their decision to publish allegations of criminal conduct against both Morgan Carey and, particularly, Alison Carey without, by their own admission, any attempt to confirm what Mariah Carey told them, is beneath contempt.

   From numerous sources they must or should have known of the trauma inflicted on Alison as a child, and that since 2015,  she has struggled with a devastating brain injury. What kind of people, knowing that, would publish the unsubstantiated claims in the book?

   Heartless, greedy people who published the allegations about Alison, then pushed them out to the media to get attention for their little book, that’s who.

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