Samantha Ronson

Police found a "small amount" of cocaine in her car and blogger Perez Hilton posted on his blog that the drugs belonged to Ronson, using another celebrity gossip blog as a source for the story. Two weeks later he started selling "Blame Samantha" t-shirts and called Ronson a "lezbot dj". Ronson hired Martin Garbus to start a defamation suit against Hilton and the original source for the story, Celebrity Babylon. Celebrity Babylon agreed to issue a retraction and apology on the understanding that Ronson would drop the claim; Hilton's lawyers asked the judge to throw out the case as an assault on his free speech rights. Garbus thought that it would be impossible to produce evidence that Hilton had acted with malice and reached an agreement with Hilton which would have kept Ronson from paying his legal fees. Ronson wanted Hilton's retraction and vetoed the proposal. Around the same time Garbus presented a $100,000 bill after the $25,000 retainer had been accounted for. Garbus withdrew from the case and neither he nor Ronson appeared at Hilton's hearing, where the judge ruled in Hilton's favour dismissing the case and ordering Ronson to pay Hilton's $85,000 legal fees. Two weeks later Garbus sued Ronson in New York for close to $142,000 in fees and services. He later dropped that suit. In May, Ronson filed suit against Garbus in Los Angeles County Superior Court, contending that his incompetence had lost the case against Hilton and asking for damages in excess of $300,000. Read Less