A judge has approved Danny Elfman’s bid to file a countersuit for fraudulent concealment against a pianist who is suing the famed composer for defamation.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Gail Killefer heard arguments on the 72-year-old Elfman’s request to file the legal counteraction against plaintiff Nomi Abadi on Tuesday, took matters under submission and ruled in his favor on Thursday. The judge ordered that the countersuit be filed by June 20.
Abadi’s underlying complaint against Elfman pertains to remarks he made during a July 2023 Rolling Stone interview. Elfman’s denials of Abadi’s allegations of repeated sexual harassment and misconduct were included in an investigative piece about an $800,000 settlement he made with his former mentee.
In her court papers, Elfman’s attorney, Camille Vasquez, alleges that Abadi was involved in “soliciting and facilitating” the interview.
“Mr. Elfman has long suspected, based on circumstantial evidence, that Ms. Abadi was intimately involved in the publication of the Rolling Stone article,” Vasquez writes, adding that her investigation “uncovered and sufficiently vetted direct, competent evidence confirming this suspicion.”
The countersuit will allege that Abadi “actually procured the publication of the Rolling Stone article in violation her contractual obligations and fraudulently concealed her involvement in (order to) induce Mr. Elfman to pay her the remaining installment payments due under the (settlement) agreement,” Vasquez further writes.
According to the countersuit — which will seek unspecified compensatory and punitive damages — in the months leading up to Elfman’s final settlement installment payment to Abadi, she began working with a reporter to “develop and ultimately publish an article detailing her false allegations against Mr. Elfman, which would run in Rolling Stone once she had collected all of her ill-gotten gains from Mr. Elfman.”
In her previous court papers, Vasquez said the intermittent friendship between Elfman and Abadi had ended in political disagreements.
Vasquez was Johnny Depp’s lawyer in his dueling litigation with former spouse Amber Heard.
Discovery in Abadi’s suit, filed last July 10, is on hold while Elfman appeals Killefer’s December decision to deny his motion to dismiss the pianist’s case on free-speech grounds.
In court papers previously filed, Abadi states in a sworn declaration that her career is in a flux and that her five years of hard work building a career in film composing has been “destroyed as a result of Mr. Elfman’s blatantly false statements about me in the Rolling Stone article.”