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Business News Legal
Kesha fan could be subpoenaed in ongoing Dr Luke dispute
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 13 March 2017
Lawyers for Dr Luke are looking to subpoena a fan of Kesha who helped organise last year’s #FreeKesha protests, which ran alongside legal efforts by the singer to be freed from her contractual commitments to the producer’s Sony-owned label.
Dr Luke, real name Lukasz Gottwald, and Kesha Sebert are still embroiled in a long-running multi-layered legal battle. Sebert accuses her long-time collaborator of abusing and raping her. He says those allegations are untrue, and were made up by the singer and her mother in a bid to get out of her contractual commitments to his companies. At one point litigation was filed in three separate states in relation to the dispute.
As the legal battle went through the motions last year, Gottwald generally enjoyed more success in court, but Sebert arguably won the PR battle. Following ultimately unsuccessful protests and petitions that called on Sony Music to cut Sebert free of her commitments to its Gottwald-led imprint Kemosabe Records, lawyers for the producer accused the singer of conducting a “co-ordinated campaign to mislead the public”, while more recently they suggested that the #FreeKesha petitions were “bogus”.
According to court papers released on Friday, Gottwald’s lawyers now want to subpoena Michael Eisele, a fan who runs the KeshaToday Twitter account and who seemingly helped organise last year’s protests. Gottwald’s team accuse Sebert of colluding with Eisele to stage the protests and petitions that targeted Sony, and which – they say – were designed to further “spread Ms Sebert’s defamatory statements and tarnish plaintiffs’ reputation”.
According to Billboard, Gottwald’s legal team say that information held by Eisele “is material and necessary to the prosecution of this action” and therefore they want “the issuance of an open commission to enable [plaintiffs] to obtain documents and other tangible things from Mr Eisele and to take his deposition as a non-party witness in this action”.
Sebert’s lawyers are yet to respond to the latest filing by the other side in the dispute.
