Celebrity News
Lady Gaga Sued for $30 Million By Ex Producer-Boyfriend Who Claims to Have Launched Her Career
(HMG) – Lady Gaga is being sued and this doesn’t sound like one of those frivolous out of left field kind of deals. The pop star is being sued by Rob Fusari, a songwriting and music producer who claims he helped launch Gaga’s lucrative career after he co-wrote some of her songs, came up with her stage name and helped get her a record deal.
Rob Fusari, who has credits on such hits as Will Smith’s “Wild, Wild West” and Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious,” filed a $30.5 million lawsuit against the Grammy Award-winning performer, saying his protege and former girlfriend ditched him as her career soared.
According to his lawsuit, a friend steered the piano-playing singer — then known by her real name, Stefani Germanotta — to him in March 2006. Though he initially dismissed her, he realized she had star potential after hearing her play in his Parsippany, New Jersey, studio, the suit said. He spent the next several months working with her every day and “radically reshaping her approach,” persuading her to drop rock riffs for dance beats, it said.
They co-wrote songs such as “Paparazzi” and “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,” which would appear on her debut album, “The Fame,” the lawsuit said. The suit also claims Fusari created her stage name by accident. A text message intended to read “Radio Ga Ga,” named after the Queen song, was changed by spell check on his cell phone to “Lady Ga Ga,” it said. “Germanotta loved it and ‘Lady Gaga’ was born.”
Their romance grew as they were “working intensely in such close emotional quarters,” according to the suit. Germanotta and her father soon signed a contract with Fusari giving him a 20 percent share of her career, the suit said.
The romance declined after Lady Gaga gained and then lost a record deal with Island Def Jam:
“The couple was now constantly bickering as Germanotta became more and more verbally abusive towards Fusari,” the suit said.
“Fusari wanted to return their relationship to a purely professional level, so in January 2007, he ended their romantic involvement.”
Supposedly Fusari introduced Lady Gaga to a record executive who ultimately shepherded her to Universal Music Group’s Interscope Records, which released “The Fame” in 2008. At that point Gaga stopped answering Fusari’s phone calls, the suit claims.
To me this lawsuit has a ring of credibility, and I expect Lady Gaga is going to have to cough up a large sum of cash before this is over.
