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TUCKER’S GANGSTA RAP LAWSUIT RECONSIDERED: Judge says jury should decide whether countersuit against C. Delores was malicious prosecution
*A Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge in Los Angeles Friday suggested a revival of a malicious prosecution suit targeting lawyers who sued C. DeLores Tucker over her attacks on rap music lyrics, reports Metropolitan News.
Judge John T. Noonan, a member of the panel hearing an appeal by C. DeLores Tucker’s widower, said a jury should decide whether Charles Ortner, David Kenner, and Geoffrey Thomas, and their clients, Interscope Records and Death Row Records, acted with malice in making “wild criminal charges” against Tucker.
Tucker, who died in 2005, in between the filing of the appellants’ and appellees’ briefs, once served as Pennsylvania’s secretary of state and founded the National Political Congress of Black Women (NPCBW), whose agenda included a campaign against the misogynistic lyrics in gangsta rap.
The record companies sued Tucker in 1995, claiming she had engaged in racketeering, extortion, unfair business practices, and other torts designed to undermine their business. She was accused of trying to induce Death Row to breach a contract with Interscope and help set up a black-controlled distribution company through the NPCBW.
The plaintiffs eventually dismissed those actions, and Tucker filed two malicious prosecution suits, in 1998 and 1999, against the record companies and a number of lawyers. Tucker and her husband accused the defendants of retaliating against her for her constitutionally protected efforts to clean up the lyrics of music sold to minors.
She said she was described as a “charlatan;” subjected to oppressive discovery, including having to sit for 11 days in deposition; and subjected to extra-judicial attacks while the litigation was ongoing, illustrative of malice on the part of the defendants.
She cited an ad in a rap magazine that she said was a death threat. She singled out Death Row/Interscope artist Tupac Shakur, who disparaged her in his hit “How Do You Want It” with the line, “Delores Tucker you’s a mother f***er.”
The suits were assigned to Senior U.S. District Judge Robert Takasugi of the Central District of California, who granted the defendants summary judgment on the ground that the Tuckers could show no damages. The Ninth Circuit reversed and remanded for consideration of the summary judgment motion on other grounds.
Takasugi then granted summary judgment again, ruling that some of the claims in the underlying suit were clearly supported by probable cause and that as to the rest, the Tuckers failed to present sufficient evidence of malice.
But Noonan, last Friday, noted that under California law, a summary judgment on the issue of malice will only be granted in “rare” cases. The suits against Tucker, he said, appeared “to be an attempt to destroy” her political organization rather than to collect damages or obtain the injunctive relief that the companies prayed for in the complaint but never moved for.
