Barbra Streisand Pays Up
An expensive start to the Memorial Day weekend for Barbra Streisand.
After months of wrangling, the singer-actress-diva met a court-imposed deadline Friday and coughed up $177,000 in legal fees to her opponents in a lawsuit battle over Web photos of her Malibu compound.
“It’s the end of this,” Streisand adversary Kenneth Adelman said Friday.
Adelman said his attorney received a check for his share of the Streisand-dispensed reimbursements–about $155,000–around noon on Friday.
Paid up in full or no, Streisand attorney John Gatti didn’t rule out further legal maneuvers in the protracted case.
“Obviously, we always look at all the options,” Gatti said Friday. “Things are under consideration.”
Adelman is the environmental-minded photographer who, in 2002, snapped aerial shots of Streisand’s posh property for California Coastal Records Project (californiacoastline.org), his online effort devoted to documenting the Golden State’s oceanfront land.
Streisand sued Adelman and his Web host, Layer42.net, in May 2003 for $10 million, alleging invasion of privacy and likening Adelman to a paparazzo. The complaint was dismissed last December, with the superstar ordered to comp the former defendants’ legal fees.
Layer42.net was due about $22,000 in attorney and court costs from Streisand.
Gatti painted the payment to Adelman as a partial victory for Streisand, noting it was a 30 percent reduction from the $222,000 he earlier sought.
After all the back and forth and back and forth, including charges from Adelman’s camp that Streisand was dragging her feet to settle the legal fees, the offending photograph remains up and available for the World Wide Web to see.
The photo can be found in a couple of places on Adelman’s site, including in the ever-expanding section devoted to the lawsuit filings. Its caption: “The photo Barbra Streisand is complaining about.”
Streisand should be able to defray, if not more than cover, her own legal bills from the case with her paycheck from her role in the upcoming Meet the Fockers, a sequel to the 2000 comedy hit, Meet the Parents.