Courtney Love Settles Twitter Defamation Suit For $430,000

Mike Marsland/WireImage

Hole singer Courtney Love has settled a lawsuit brought against her by Dawn Simorangkir, a fashion designer who claims that Love defamed her in a series of messages on Twitter last year. The settlement will not be announced until next week, but the Hollywood Reporter's sources say Love will pay Simorangkir $430,000. The money will be doled out in payments beginning today and ending in 2014.

Courtney Love's Wildest Meltdowns

Love was originally set to go to trial for the lawsuit in January, but it was postponed when the parties began to negotiate a settlement. If the case had gone to trial, it could have set a legal precedent for what qualifies as defamation on Twitter. Simorangkir had alleged that Love had used her power as a celebrity to deliberately damage her career as a fashion designer.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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