Hollywood Gets Its Hands on Twitter

Early Saturday morning, I headed to the gym and proceeded to the treadmill section to begin my workout. My favorite channel to watch while running on the treadmill is E!, particularly Joel McHale’s show called The Soup. It is my one-stop shop to get all the celebrity news and gossip of the week, wrapped with sarcastic humor. Most of the time, the news is entertaining and allows me to forget the monotonous beat of the treadmill. While running I heard earth-shattering news that Courtney Love, rocker and widow of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, is being sued by her former fashion designer,Dawn Simorangkir, over comments Love has written about her on Twitter and MySpace. Needless to say, it was shocking when I heard it at the time, but I figured it was only a matter of time before Hollywood got itself in a mess over Twitter.

Catching a glimpse of the lawsuit on TV was not enough for me. I wanted to learn more about what happened, so I searched the Internet to find out the full scoop. According to ABC News, a libel claim was filed by Simorangkir in Los Angeles Superior Court on March 26. Love used Twitter to disseminate "an obsessive and delusional crusade" of malicious libel against her and also slandered her on MySpace. The court documents claim that Love "became infatuated" with Simorangkir and her "Boudoir Queen" clothing line after discovering the designer on Etsy, an online marketplace catering to independent designers. Love commissioned Simorangkir to create clothing for her and flew her out to Los Angeles, but then balked when she was invoiced for the designer's work in February and March. This was enough information for me, but in case you want to read the nitty gritty, click here to read the complaint against Courtney Love.

As I have mentioned before in previous blogs, Twitter is a popular online community for many celebrities. It allows them to communicate with their fan base, keeps fans up-to-date about things going on in their lives and enables them to announce concerts and available tickets etc. In fact, “Twitterati” is the new term that has been coined to demonstrate that the elite “Tweet.” These days, you’ll find John Mayer, Lance Armstrong, Paris Hilton and P. Ditty on Twitter. Whether you choose to follow them is a story for a different day.

After hearing and reading about the latest scandal related to Twitter, I am not sure what surprised me the most. The fact that a celebrity is actually taking the time to vent via Twitter or the fact that the opponent is suing for slandering on Twitter and MySpace is up for a debate. I guess even though both seem farfetched, for some reason I was naive to think everyone was going to play nice in the sandbox. It was only a matter of time before celebrities abuse the online community.