As we heard earlier this week, Daniel Giersch has obtained an injunction against the American publication, Vanity Fair, in his native Germany. Giersch filed suit in Hamburg, citing the violation of his privacy rights under German law following an October article in which his ex wife, Kelly Rutherford, made several statements he claims are false. The article, titled “Inside Kelly Rutherford’s Brutal, Globe-Spanning Custody Battle,” remains available on Vanity Fair’s website. Vanity Fair has six months to respond to the injunction.
Giersch’s lawsuit was accompanied by a PR statement from his lawyers in which they seemed to indicate that additional lawsuits would follow. Giersch’s lawyer, Dr. Oliver Scherenberg, stated “Our client, Daniel Giersch, has had to repeatedly endure in recent years numerous assertions that were untrue and completely fabricated. This needs to come to an end, now. Our client has suffered significant injury to his reputation due to these untrue and defamatory assertions, against which he is now defending himself. The actions taken against the false assertions published in Vanity Fair are only the beginning.” Other outlets which have run articles highly biased toward Rutherford include The Daily Beast, People Magazine and MSNBC and ABC among others.
As many of you mentioned in the comments, Giersch really played a long game here. He gained physical custody of his children with Kelly: Hermes, 9, and Helena, 6, in 2012, when a California court ordered that the children live with him in Monaco. He waited years, until he gained sole custody, to refute the false statements about him in the press and he did it through legal means. Very occasionally his lawyer would give an extremely measured response to Rutherford’s behavior, but they did not respond to her many, many interviews and statements maligning him. Giersch also continued to state that he would promote Rutherford’s relationship with her children. All signs point to him doing that. Even after Rutherford abducted the children this summer by keeping them past their scheduled visit, she admitted in an interview following their return to Monaco that she was able to Skype with them just a day or two later.
Now that Giersch has sued Vanity Fair, he may go after additional news outlets or this may have achieved his objective. LillySue noted in our last story that Rutherford has been shopping a book. This is confirmed in a People article from April which states “she’s spreading awareness by writing a book about her ordeal.” Perhaps this was part of her plan all along – write a book and star in a Lifetime movie in which she’s a faultless American actress and devoted mom who fell in love with a nefarious German businessman, only to lose her kids and fortune in an international custody battle lasting for years. That’s the picture she’s been painting in the media, and Giersch is finally trying to show how wrong it is.
Photo credit: Getty and WENN
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