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Keeping Track of Celebrity Image Use
Protecting Paris Hilton's image can involve some complicated legal maneuvering. When the heiress failed to pay a bill, the personal belongings in her storage locker were sold and, in January, ended up on Paris Exposed.com. Her legal team at L.A.'s Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & Aldisert quickly won a temporary restraining order against the site, which promised paying subscribers they could view Hilton's diary, racy photographs and even medical records. But the defendants scattered, and the site soon resurfaced on servers outside the United States.
For celebrities, image is everything. For the entertainment lawyers who represent their interests, that means confronting ever more complex efforts to profit from (or poison) a client's fame. Among the talent-side lawyers, there's a small club of firms doing the lion's share of the image work for the big stars. Insiders point to Lavely & Singer; Dreier Stein & Kahan; Kinsella Weitzman; and the well-known lawyer to the stars, Bertram Fields. Some cases are straightforward. In June, for example, lawyers at L.A.'s Lavely & Singer representing Britney Spears quickly forced a Florida radio station to remove billboards displaying the pop star's shaved head alongside that of the station's DJ under the words 'Total Nut Jobs.'
Image-related concerns pop up on the corporate side, too. Roger Goff, a transactional lawyer at L.A.'s Goff Law Corp., offers an example from his work for the director and producer of 'Splinter,' the Toby Wilkins horror movie now in production. Actress Jill Wagner wanted to ensure her positive image was protected because she also serves as 'The Mercury Chick' in ongoing Lincoln-Mercury commercials. That involved negotiations to ensure her lines in the film reflected her clean-cut image, Goff said.
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