LOS ANGELES, March 21 — Sean Penn is fighting. But not with his fists — repeat, not with his fists.
Last September, the two-time Oscar-winning actor, humanitarian and occasional journalist filed a US$10 million (RM41 million) complaint in New York’s Supreme Court against Lee Daniels, the movie director and co-creator of the television hit Empire, for defamation and “wanton and reckless disregard of the truth.” This was after Daniels suggested in passing to The Hollywood Reporter that Penn had been physically abusive of his first wife, Madonna.
Because such rumours have existed since the couple’s turbulent, four-year-marriage in the 1980s, one could be forgiven for wondering: Why challenge them now?
Through his lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, Penn declined to be interviewed. But Douglas Brinkley, the historian and a friend, thinks Penn, 55, has become more conscious of his legacy, which includes a charity to assist survivors of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and a women’s health clinic there.
“You start thinking about your mortality when you turn 50,” Brinkley said, adding that Penn doesn’t “want to go down in history as the guy who beat up Madonna.”
And the making of history, as we all know, has changed in the 30-odd years since the couple was, as quaintly reported by the weekly, then-print-only version of People, nicknamed S&M. Hints and allegations that may have once faded to mere footnotes in a biography can now be instantly retrieved, mashed together and Ping-Ponged around the Internet with the tap of a finger.
“There is no question this has been one of the pernicious effects of the information revolution,” said Allan Mayer, who heads the strategic communications division at 42West and does not represent Penn. A news release isn’t what it used to be, in other words. “If you want to be taken seriously, you have to take some legal action,” Mayer said.
Even if the outcome of such action is predictable: a settlement or outright dismissal. “There is a good chance this is going to get bounced,” said Bert Fields, a veteran entertainment lawyer who represented Tom Cruise when the actor sued two tabloids after they claimed he had abandoned the relationship with his daughter, Suri. “Charges are tough to prove.”
In the complaint, Penn’s lawyers asserted that Penn had been “the subject of scandalous, scurrilous and baseless attacks,” adding that he “will no longer tolerate the reckless and malicious behaviour of others.”
Daniels, 56, had compared Penn with Terrence Howard, the flamboyant star of Empire who was arrested in 2001 for hitting his wife at the time, Lori McCommas, and, last summer, was battling with another former wife over the terms of their divorce settlement.
Howard, who acknowledged hitting McCommas, “ain’t done nothing different than Marlon Brando or Sean Penn,” said Daniels, who was pointing out what he believed was race-based criticism of the Empire star.
(In an only-in-Hollywood-kids twist, Penn, Daniels and Howard are all represented by Creative Artists Agency, surely making for some awkward conversations over the kale salad at Hinoki & the Bird.)
Daniels’ legal team is hoping the case will be dismissed, contending in court filings that Daniels’s comments did not say Penn was “guilty of ongoing, continuous violence against women,” but, instead, stated an opinion not subject to the standards of defamation. They argue, too, that Daniels’ statement “could not have tarnished Penn’s reputation for domestic abuse any further than a quarter-century of explicit media coverage already has.”
James Sammataro, the lawyer representing Daniels, said, “Sean is not the first person to want to rewrite the narrative of his life.” (Indeed, “online reputation manager” is now a job description.)
Court documents filed by Sammataro show that a Google search with the phrase “Sean Penn and domestic violence” produced hundreds of thousands of results, including excerpts from Christopher Andersen’s 1991 book, Madonna Unauthorised, which has been cited liberally since it was published.
“Responding to Domestic Violence,” a 2015 textbook that explores domestic violence and society, states that Penn hit Madonna with a baseball bat in 1987. Eve Buzawa, one of the authors and the chairwoman of the school of criminology and justice studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, said she did not contact Penn or Madonna for comment, but instead used “media sources for those stories.”
“When there are so many articles and so much press,” she said, “there has to be something.”
Or does there?
In December, Gawker, currently embroiled in a legal battle of its own, sought to track down the genesis of the rumours about the couple’s marital discord and obtained a copy of an article from January 1989 in a British tabloid called The People. Getting more specific than the American magazine to which it bears no relation, the tabloid said that Madonna had been “beaten, gagged” and “strapped to an armchair.” (Picking up the story soon after in 1989, the gossip columnist Liz Smith said she had “no evidence that this happened” though “some particularly violent episode” was suspected.)
But Penn, who, after Madonna, married and divorced Robin Wright Penn and had been abortively engaged to Charlize Theron, had never been arrested for domestic violence, according to his lawsuit. And in October of last year, Madonna signed a declaration stating that she was aware of allegations of domestic abuse against her by Penn, and they were false, including the part about the baseball bat.
“While we certainly had more than one heated argument during our marriage,” Madonna stated, “Sean has never struck me, ‘tied me up’ or physically assaulted me, and any report to the contrary is completely outrageous, malicious, reckless and false.” (For good measure, she posed with Penn at a fundraiser for his Haitian non-profit in January, later serenading him during a performance involving a ukulele.)
With this statement on record, “anyone who repeats those lies does so at their peril,” Penn’s lawyer, Rosengart, said in a statement. — The New York Times
