Tom Cruise Wiretapping Lawsuit: Judge Throws Out Case Against Hollywood Actor (VIDEO)
Tom Cruise has won a wiretapping lawsuit after a judge dismissed the claims against him by handing down a summary judgment.
The lawsuit had been filed against the Hollywood actor by former Bold magazine editor, Michael Davis Sapir. The lawsuit had claimed Cruise and attorney Bert Fields had hired private investigator Anthony Pellicano to wiretap him.
However, in a hearing at the Central Civil West courtroom in Los Angeles, Judge Elihu M. Berle confirmed that the statute of limitations had expired and the claim was therefore no longer valid.
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Cruise and Fields had argued for dismissal of the lawsuit using four core arguments, of which the statute of limitations was one. However, Cruise's attorney, Brian A. Sun of the Jones Day law firm, has since confirmed that the lawsuit was thrown out on this one argument alone, The Wrap has reported.
The case goes back more than a decade ago, when in 2001 Sapir offered half a million dollars to anyone who could offer him video evidence that Tom Cruise was homosexual.
Soon after Sapir released a press statement claiming that someone had produced a video confirming that Cruise was gay. However, that led to Cruise filing a defamation lawsuit for $100 million against Sapir. The case eventually was settled in November 2001, and resulted among other things with Sapir offering a full retraction and an admission that it was someone else in the video.
However, the heated relationship between Cruise and Sapir did not end there, and later Sapir also claimed he was investigated by Pellicano, who was hired by Cruise and Fields. Sapir claimed that his phone had been wiretapped by the investigator. Indeed Pellicano is currently in prison for racketeering and wiretapping convictions.
However, Sapir did not officially file any legal action against Cruise and Fields until the end of 2009, which is after the statute of limitations under California law expired.
Attorneys for Cruise and Fields have also argued that they did not hire Pellicano to investigate Sapir at all, and that there was also no evidence of any wiretapping. The attorneys also highlighted the fact that Sapir had agreed in the 2001 settlement that he would make no further claims against Cruise and Fields.
Here is a video news report including the Tom Cruise legal win:
