You might think that Lady Gaga was born like that – that one day she popped out of the womb and shouted “I know! Cigarette sunglasses!”

But you’d be wrong. Lady Gaga is a creation. She’s the spectacular result of years of arduous labour, possibly involving a sack of ostrich feathers, a Pritt Stick and a full month spent watching hundreds of old Madonna videos on a television set that doesn’t really work properly. Someone is responsible for bringing Lady Gaga to life. And that someone might be Rob Fusari, the man who’s currently suing Lady Gaga.

Fusari – a songwriter and producer – wants $30 million dollars in unpaid songwriting and merchandise royalties paid to him because he says that he transformed Lady Gaga into the woman she is now. $30 million for creating Lady Gaga? Surely a punch in the nutsack would be far more appropriate.

It’s an age-old story. Boy meets girl, boy and girl split up, girl becomes inexplicably famous for running around shouting “RAH RAH OOH MAMA!” in a pair of sunglasses made out of lung cancer, boy gets a bit narked off and sues girl for withholding royalties. That’s how it was once with King Arthur and Guinevere, and that’s how it is now with Lady Gaga and Rob Fusari.

Once, you see, Lady Gaga wasn’t Lady Gaga. She was a girl named Stefani Germanotta who had nothing more than natural piano-playing ability and a long-held dream that one day she could advertise Virgin Mobile in the most preposterously overblown way imaginable. But then Stefani met Rob Fusari, the man behind that Destiny’s Child song about having an arse like a load of old jelly, and they hit it off.

But then, after Stefani Germanotta slowly transformed from a normal girl into a woman who dressed like Mr Benn after an alcohol and self-loathing-fuelled rampage through his fancy dress shop and only sang songs about other people’s vaginas, she and Fusari split up. And that’s where things get complicated. Rob Fusari is now suing Lady Gaga for unpaid royalties because he claims that he’s essentially the brains behind the operation. Well, you know, not the brains – he’s the bag of rags and the stack of Madonna albums behind the operation. BBC News reports:

Fusari claims he spent several months “radically reshaping her approach” and transforming her into Lady Gaga – the stage name she adopted at his suggestion, he alleges. Fusari claims that he and Ms Germanotta were already romantically involved when they formed a joint business venture – Team Love Child LLC – in May 2006, to promote Gaga’s career.

That’s amazing. We didn’t know you could sue people for $30 million just because you gave them a stupid name and dressed them up like arseholes all the time. Somebody ought to inform Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie – as soon as their kids hear about this, they’ll be on the phone to their lawyers in a jiffy.

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