Bad news, folks – the looming court battle between Michael Jackson and financial firm who hit him with a $48 million breach of contract lawsuit has been settled out of court, dashing everyone's hopes of another Macaulay Culkin court appearance.
Although settling with the Prescient Acquisition Group out of court will be good for Michael Jackson's public image – he knows as well as we do that the sight of him in court will stir up confusingly false mental images of him molesting children – the undisclosed figure of the settlement means that it's probably fair to assume that Michael Jackson had to fork over quite a lot of money. And that means one of three things will happen: 1) Michael Jackson will have to ditch plans for that 50ft laser-eyed robot of himself to stroll around Las Vegas, 2) Michael Jackson will have to cut down on the old Jesus Juice intake or 3) Michael Jackson might have to record and promote a new album to make some money back. We're not sure which one's worse.
For all the times people have tried to sue Michael Jackson – for not paying his vet bills, for not paying his ex-wife enough for her to sue him again, for actually kind of sort of murdering someone but not really – the lawsuit for $48 million by New Jersey finance firm Prescient Acquisition Group is easily the most serious. It's also so dull and oblique that your brain would turn into sand if we told you the full ins and outs of it, so we're going to fob that bit off to Reuters:
Prescient sued Jackson in July 2005 for $48 million, the amount it claimed he owed the firm for serving as intermediary in a refinancing deal that allowed him to avoid foreclosure on loans secured by his prized stake in the Beatles song catalog. Specifically, Prescient said it had arranged to secure the financing Jackson needed to pay off $272.5 million in debt originally provided by Bank of America and later sold to the New York-based hedge fund Fortress Investment Group.
OK, you can wake up now. Between then and now, Michael Jackson has been worried enough to apparently stop paying his lawyers and also give a sworn deposition where he slagged off his brother's friend quite a lot. This whole Michael Jackson lawsuit was due to go to court at some point this week, but now Michael Jackson has decided to settle out of court for an undisclosed amount before it even came to that. We have to admit we're a little bit disappointed by this news, since a Michael Jackson lawsuit case would have been just as exciting as the Phil Spector murder trial, except with less gory gunshot wounds and more endless dry discussions about various refinancing package interest rates. It would've been fun, you'd have liked it.
So now we'll just hope and pray that lawsuits against Michael Jackson by the lawyer chasing $200,000 in unpaid bills and the similar lawsuit by Michael Jackson's old accountants go to court, otherwise Michael Jackson might find the time to actually take the recording of his new album seriously. And that would be much less fun for everybody.
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Mithaearon says
I await comments from the Cult of Michael over this story :P
bobmoo79 says
It is rumoured the Michael Jackson sealed the deal for $5million, much less than the $48million dash was after. The fact that each party must pay their own legal bills means that whatever happened in court, nobody had to pay a shed load of money, and neither party felt particularly aggrieved by the situation.
Michael Jackson never signed a single contract and so Dash had a very week case. The person that did sign did not have official authorization or power of eterny for Michael Jackson.
Michael Jackson denied a long time ago that the robot was anything to do with him. The artist who was planning it also stated that he had not contacted Jacko. Therefore backing up JAcko’s claims.
Jacko.
Prescient have said that the loan arranged was initially to allow Jacko to buy out Sony’s 50% share in Sony/ATV, which consists of the Beatles catalogue but also thousands of other songs by Elvis Presley, Beyonce, Destiny’s Child, Ne-Yo, Fall Out Boy, Shakira, Rhianna etc etc.
Michael Jackson’s new album sounds as though it is shaping up to be quite good with people like Will.i.am, Ne-Yo, Teddy Riley, Kanye West, John Legend all rumoured to be involved in on eway or another. Instead, the money probably went into a joint purchase (with Sony) of Future Publishing LLC, which holds the rights to songs by Eminem and many others.