Reading Time: 2 minutes
This spring, a default judgment ordered Jermaine Jackson to pay $6.5 million.
A woman sued him, accusing him of raping her. He seemingly ignored every attempt at a summons.
If Jackson didn’t see the lawsuit before, he’s taken notice now.
He’s managed to get the default judgment voided. What’s next?
It looks like they’re headed to court after all
People obtained Judge Elaine W. Mandel’s June 30 ruling, which voids the default judgment against Jackson.
The judgment would have required him to pay $6.5 million to a woman who accuse shim of rape and sexual assault.
This was not a jury (or judicial) verdict, but a default judgment — which applies when a defendant doesn’t show up in court or misses a filing deadline or something along those lines.
In Jackson’s case, he seemed to ignore the lawsuit altogether, dodging process servers and ignoring a court-approved advertisement in the Los Angeles Times in a bid for him to come defend himself.
This spring, the court heard that the plaintiff’s attorney had done all that they could to notify Jackson, but received no reply.
Jackson denies having sexually assaulted Rita Butler Barrett, though that is not the substance of this ruling.
(Rather, the ruling will give him a chance to defend himself in court, which is all that the attempts to serve him with notice of the lawsuit wanted in the first place.)
When Jackson responded in court to the default ruling, he had two major bones to pick.
The first was that he was incorrectly sued, as he has changed his name from the one by which everyone (including us) know him.
The second is that he alleges to have been out of the country for the entirety of the time that the plaintiff attempted to serve him with the lawsuit.
‘Jermaine LaJuane Jacksun’
What’s Jackson’s new name?
He argues that, because he legally changed his name to “Jermaine LaJuane Jacksun” in 2013, he was served with notice under an incorrect name.
Names are complex. Certainly, a celebrity changing the spelling of a surname is not the most emotionally charged name change that a person might have.
However, the court went with it.
Additionally, he alleged that he was living in Bahrain, which insulated him from process servers and prevented him from seeing The Los Angeles Times.
Judge Mandel seems to agree that this did not give Jackson — or Jacksun, as the case may be — a fair opportunity to respond to the lawsuit.
Some argue that this argument shouldn’t hold up, because a famous man being sued could surely have been informed by family or friends.
But surely we’d all prefer to live in a society where the courts have to do things just right before they force us to fork over a small fortune, even if it’s for a good cause?
The good news is that Barrett will have her chance to present evidence to the court and to tell her story in the pursuit of justice.
She has waited a very long time for this case to make it to trial.
