FILE – Lady Gaga arrives at the 64th annual Grammy Awards at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on April 3, 2022, in Las Vegas. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
The lawsuit against Lady Gaga by the woman who admitted to participating in the violent theft of the pop superstar's French Bulldogs has lost out in court again — likely for the last time.
Lady Gaga's beloved dogs Koji and Gustav were nabbed during an armed robbery in February 2021 while in the care of dog walker Ryan Fischer in Hollywood, California. Lady Gaga offered a $500,000 "no questions asked" reward for the safe return of the dogs, and Jennifer McBride brought the dogs to the Los Angeles Police Department that same day. She initially told police that she happened to come across the dogs by chance and didn't know who the owner was, but that turned out not to be the case: McBride had links to the men involved in the robbery, and she subsequently pleaded no contest to knowingly receiving stolen property.
Nevertheless, she later sued Lady Gaga for the reward money, saying that the "no questions asked" offer meant that she was entitled to the $500,000.
On Monday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Holly J. Fujie found that McBride's own participation in the dognapping negated any access she might have to the reward money.
"The Court thus finds that all of Plaintiff's claims as alleged in the [complaint] are barred under the unclean hands doctrine as a result of Plaintiff's no contest plea," Fujie wrote in her ruling. "The Court also specifically finds that there exists no reasonable probability that the defects noted above can be cured by amendment. Therefore, Moving Defendant's Demurrer to the [complaint] is sustained without leave to amend."
It is not the first time McBride has been on the losing end of the lawsuit: as Law&Crime previously reported, Fujie previously dismissed the case in July. At that time, the judge gave McBride the opportunity to amend her complaint, and indeed, the plaintiff filed an amended complaint on July 28.
Because Fujie preemptively denied permission for McBride to amend her complaint, she will not get another chance to try to get the reward money.
Fujie noted that in the amended complaint, McBride argued that she had taken the no-contest plea because it was in her "best interest, [but] not because she was not guilty of the charge." McBride insisted that she "only received Defendant['s] bulldogs for the purposes of ensuring their protection and safely returning them to Defendants in reliance on Defendants' offer to pay a reward of $500,000.00 'no questions asked.'"
According to the judge, McBride's alleged motivation — to return the dogs to their owner — is "not relevant to the analysis of this claim," because McBride admitted in her amended complaint to all the elements of the crime of receiving stolen property, to which she pleaded no contest.
In fact, the judge seemed to believe McBride had dug an even deeper hole for herself with the amended complaint.
"Although Plaintiff alleges that her motivation was to protect the bulldogs (and also to collect $500,000.00), this alleged motivation does not negate her guilt of the charge because she has admitted receiving the bulldogs with knowledge that they were stolen property," the judge's decision says (emphasis in original). "If anything, the FAC makes even clearer than did the original Complaint that Plaintiff has unclean hands that prevent her from profiting from her actions."
In her ruling, Fujie said that McBride hadn't done enough to change her mind from her July decision.
"In its July 10, 2023 order, the Court found that Plaintiff's claims alleged in the original Complaint were barred under the unclean hands doctrine as a result of Plaintiff's no contest plea," the judge wrote in Monday's order. "The Court finds that nothing alleged in the FAC changes this conclusion."
James Howard Jackson pleaded guilty in 2022 to one count of attempted murder for shooting Fischer, who suffered serious injuries but ultimately recovered.
Read Fujie's ruling, below.
