Clone Website Causes Major Lawsuit Mess For Doctor
From May it Please the Court:
If ever there was a horror story about stealing a website, then this case is it: Del Junco v. Hufnagel. Dr. Tirso Del Junco, Jr. is a highly qualified surgeon who assists women with alternative surgeries instead of hysterectomies. For reasons not stated in the opinion, another individual, V. Georges Hufnagel, who had her medical license revoked in California and New York and disciplinary proceedings pending against her in the state of Hawaii, tried to steal Dr. Del Junco’s website.
Dr. Del Junco had a website entitled drdeljuncojr.com. Hufnagel started a mimic-style website without the “jr” part of Dr. Del Junco’s URL. On her mimic website, she defamed Dr. Del Junco and claimed he was not a vascular surgeon (he is) and he had no specialized training (he does). Unfortunately for Dr. Del Junco, his business started to fall off and he suffered financially as a result of the traffic directed away from his website by the mimic website.
He consequently brought a lawsuit against Ms. Hufnagel and obtained an injunction to prevent her from maintaining the mimic website and continuing to defame him.
That’s when the trouble doubled (in the first link above, skip down to page 5). A prior court had found Hufnagel was a “vexatious litigant,” and this case proved to be more of the same. She filed a 140-page response to the motion for injunction (you’re allowed only 15 pages). When the court granted Dr. Del Junco’s injunction, she ignored it. She failed to show up for hearings. She filed papers that didn’t comply with court rules. To top it off, she filed and withdrew pleadings at will and without the court’s permission.
Then she hired an attorney, but things didn’t get better. The attorney and Hufnagel succeeded in delaying the proceedings further. Finally, the trial court stepped in and struck her answer and entered her default. Not surprisingly, she appealed.
The court of appeal had no problem sustaining the trial court’s primary orders.
As the justices observed about Hufnagel, “from the start of the case to the time the trial court struck Hufnagel’s answer and entered default, Hufnagel showed no interest in taking part in the case or in following orders of the court. All of her actions were those of an obstructionist, not a participant in the process. She filed documents in propria persona that did not follow proper form, were lengthy, contained irrelevant information, and violated court rules. She filed documents without serving them. She failed to comply with the injunction and continued to operate the counterfeit web site. She did not pay sanctions when ordered. When she had counsel, things did not improve. Misrepresentations were made to the court, documents were not filed when promised, responses to interrogatories were never delivered, and phone calls were not returned. The actions of Hufnagel and her counsel were willful and deliberate, caused unnecessary delay, and wasted the trial court’s resources. The actions caused Dr. Del Junco to incur unnecessary expense.”
His final award? $358,724.90, after the court of appeal struck the trial court’s award of punitive damages due to a lack of proof of Hufnagel’s financial worth.
I’ll bet she refused to produce documents detailing her financial worth during the underlying lawsuit.
Here’s the good doctor’s new website, Alternative Surgery.
Attorney Willie Gary Paying $28,000 a Month in Child Support
Child support payments of $28,000 a month.
That’s what high profile attorney Willie Gary is paying his former lover Diana Gowins monthly.
Damn, that’s a lot of money
Well it wasn’t always that way. In the beginning he was giving her $28,000 a month. But then he started getting an inkling she wasn’t using this money just for taking care of the twins they had together. According to the court documents, it turns out Diana wasn’t putting the money into the two kid’s college fund like she promised! She was splurging the money on cruises without the kids, tummy tucks, a Steinway piano, and designer clothes. She also spent thousands on private school tuition and diamonds for her oldest child, a teenage daughter from a previous relationship. Yes, diamonds.
Willie Gary got pissed
So what happened next was that Willie Gary, along with his lawyers, argued in November of 2005 to Fulton County Superior Court Judge Cynthia Wright that Diana Gowins was misusing the child support to pay for things not directly related to the well being of their children together. I mean, seriously, tummy tucks and cruises? I’d be pissed off too!
They ended up winning the case and his child support payments were reduced to more modest $5000 a month, leaving Diana with presumably only one cruise every two months, instead of weekly. The judge then told Gowins, a former nurse, to go back to work and quit going crazy with her lavish spending but she refused to do so. She responded to the judge that she has a right to be a stay-at-home mom.
After a little bit, it seemed Diana didn’t like her bimonthly cruises and wanted them back up to a weekly schedule. So Diana Gowins took Willie Gary back to court to contest the reduction in child support payments.
Georgia Court of Appeals rejects the reduction
The Georgia Court of Appeals decides to side with the mother, Diana, thereby throwing out the previous ruling by Judge Cynthia Wright. The child support payments have now been re-raised to $28,000 a month.
“It’s a big decision,” said Diana Gowins’ attorney, Randy Kessler. After reading a copy of the ruling by the appellate court he faxed a letter to Willie Gary that afternoon with a demand for $300,000 immediately in order to catch up with the difference from the time that Willie was only paying $5000 a month. After this, Kessler expects Willie to resume the regular monthly payments of $28,000.
Willie Gary makes a salary of about $13,000,000 (that’s 13 million) a year, so according to Diana Gowin’s lawyer, the child support payments of $28,000 are comparable to a man earning an annual salary of $130,000 paying $280 a month for their twins.
“He agreed to it,” says Diana’s lawyer Randy Kessler. “He can afford it. He can’t just change his mind.”
Willie Gary taking it to the Georgia Supreme CourtÂ
The plot thickens. Willie Gary and his Atlanta attorney, Kenny Schatten, are now planning on appealing the decision to the Georgia Supreme Court.
“I just look at this decision [by the appellate court] as a small hurdle,” he said.
$28 thousand a month in child support isn’t chump change, even for the $13 million dollar man Willie Gary.
Britney Spears Billboard Deemed Too Nuts
From Schimmer Legal:
A Florida radio station ran billboards showing Britney Spears and one of the station’s DJs, suggesting that she and DJ were ‘nuts.’ Ms. Spears contested the use. The radio station is pulling the billboards. Unfortunately, the Smoking Gun has printed only one of Britney’s lawyers letters, not the one that contains ‘many legal authorities.’ However this letter does site Florida statutes and law. Interestingly, the two cases cited do not apply to media defendants.
There is some precedent for media defendants to utilize someone’s name or likeness if the person was the subject of the media’s product. In Velez v. VV Pub. Corp., the Village Voice used an unflattering photo of local politico Ramon Velez (a subject of Voice exposes), in an advertisement for the Voice. The use of the photo fairly represented the Voice’s news coverage. 135 A.D.2d 47, 50, 524 N.Y.S.2d 186, 187 (1st Dept. 1988) (”[T]he incidental use in an advertisement by a news disseminator of a person’s name or identity does not violate the statutory proscription, if it had previously published the item exhibited as a matter of public interest.”
In Montana v San Jose Mercury News, the newspaper sold posters of Joe Montana following a Super Bowl victory, which posters were held to have news value due to their ‘relatively contemporaneous’ publication. Because the use was in connection with merchandise rather than a mere advertisement for the newspaper, this ruling seems like a bit of an outlier. 34 Cal.App.4th 790 (1995).
See more discussion by Stanford University Library here.
If you’re aware of Florida caselaw that would suggest how a media defendant using a name or likeness in advertisement for its services might fare, send it on in.
