Dr. Luke’s Own Self-Praise Just Led a Court to Rule in Favor of Kesha
The music producer's defamation case may hinge on whether he's seen as a public figure or private citizen. He shouldn't have talked about how famous he is!
JusticePolitics

Next month, Kesha and Dr. Luke’s court case will finally go to trial, almost 1o years after she first brought sexual assault allegations against the music producer and he countersued for defamation in 2014. The past decade has wrought a whole ping pong game of appeals between the two parties, including one that ruled favorably for Kesha yesterday.
New York’s Court of Appeals ruled that Dr. Luke, née Lukasz Sebastian Gottwald, is a public figure and therefore must prove in his defamation case that Kesha acted with “actual malice” in making the allegations against him back then. This decision reverses a mid-level New York appeals court ruling in 2021 that Gottwald is a private citizen, which lowers the threshold for proving defamation from “malice” to simple “negligence.”