You may remember that all the way back in March, the court allowed actress Lindsay Lohan to move forward with a lawsuit against GTA 5 publisher Take-Two Interactive.
Unfortunately for Lohan, a judge has just thrown out the lawsuit – which claimed that a character in the open world game was an ‘unequivocal’ reference to her.
The actress originally filed the lawsuit back in 2014, claiming that her likeness had been used without her permission for the character of Lacey Jonas.
Earlier this year, Lohan actually won a preliminary victory when Take-Two’s attempt to dismiss the case was denied – however, her case has now been thrown out thanks to the First Amendment protections it’s owed.
An appeals court ruling states:
As to Lohan’s claim that an avatar in the video game is she and that her image is used in various images, defendants also never referred to Lohan by name or used her actual name in the video game, never used Lohan herself as an actor for the video game, and never used a photograph of Lohan. Even if we accept plaintiffs’ contentions that the video game depictions are close enough to be considered representations of the respective plaintiffs, plaintiffs’ claims should be dismissed because this video game does not fall under the statutory definitions of ‘advertising’ or ‘trade.
In a nutshell, the court found that because GTA 5 is – y’know – a videogame where you run around doing ludicrous shit, the game was found a work of fiction and satire, meaning Lohan’s case is null and void.
Of course, Lohan is free to appeal this decision – I expect the case of the century to storm on for a few more months yet.
Besides, as you can see above, Lacey Jonas is clearly modeled after Kate Upton, not Lindsay Lohan.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.