An appellate court ruled in favor of music producer Dr. Luke on Thursday on an important legal question in his defamation suit against Kesha , saying …
An appellate court ruled in favor of music producer Dr. Luke on Thursday on an important legal question in his defamation suit against Kesha, saying the Grammy-nominated hitmaker isn’t a public figure in the eyes of the law. The decision isn’t a final judgment in the long-running court clash between the multiplatinum-selling singer, who says Dr. Luke raped her, and the producer, who denies it and says his onetime protege smeared him with lies. But Thursday’s ruling upholds a lower court’s 2020 finding that Kesha made a defamatory statement about him — to Lady Gaga — and that she can’t defend it by saying that Dr. Luke is a public figure. That matters because public figures have to meet a higher legal standard than everyday people do in order to prove they’ve been defamed. Requests for comment were sent to lawyers for Dr. Luke, for Kesha and for more than a dozen media outlets and organizations that filed friend-of-the-court papers in the case. The media group argued that the lower court’s ruling would help powerful people squash free speech and reporting on sexual abuse.
