Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Alleged "nappy-headed ho" files lawsuit against Imus

Rutgers basketball player sues Imus and CBS Radio, alleging defamation of character - Yahoo! Sports

Kia Vaughn has filed a slander & defamation of character lawsuit against Don Imus, Bernie McGuirk, CBS Corp, and CBS Radio.

She has now verified that she is at least a ho.

Sue me, I have no money, at least of the CBS kind. Apparently, MSNBC doesn't have any money either, since she's not suing it, although the words were uttered on Imus' MSNBC morning show (his CBS Radio show was televised on MSNBC -- don't ask me how that mating occurred). All along, I've said that I thought if the words -- admittedly mean-spirited and wrong -- had been uttered just on radio, this would not have become the spectacle it became, with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and their circus-deafening hyperbole. But because it was aired on TV, this became a big deal.

However, Vaughn's lawyers, no doubt very smart but not very careful observers, decided not to sue the television network.

"Ho" is a slang term for prostitute, a shortened version of "whore." A prostitute, in the modern vernacular, doesn't just mean a person who takes money for sex. It is a person who seeks money in return for something. Oftentimes, an actor who does a commercial for some old-age
life insurance company, like the captain from the Love Boat, is called a whore. It is this definition to which I make my claim that Vaughn is a whore: She's a money whore, rather than a sex whore. She's seeking money from entities that allegedly "harmed" her. We know her feelings may have been hurt, but what else?

Ms. Vaughn is a college student. She didn't have a reputation to tarnish. Besides, the Rutgers team showed some class in dealing with the spectacle, at least in public. So, her reputation wasn't sullied. In fact, nobody knew who she was until this happened, and people got to see some classy individuals that they might not have seen otherwise.

While I won't so far as to say -- though the implication is very obvious -- that Imus' comments bolstered Vaughn's image, I will say that it certainly didn't hurt it.

More.


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