Cardi B defamation case against YouTuber gets underway

completemusicupdate.com:

As Cardi B’s defamation court battle against YouTuber Latasha Kebe got underway yesterday, a legal rep for the latter urged the jury to consider the context in which his client’s videos were presented and her humorous presentation style.

But a lawyer repping Cardi B insisted that the things Kebe had said about her client were no laughing matter.Cardi B – real name Belcalis Almanzar – sued Kebe back in March 2019 in relation to various videos the YouTuber posted to her unWinewithTashaK channel which, the rapper claims, included defamatory statements.

Among other things, Kebe is accused of incorrectly stating that Almanzar “was a prostitute … was a user of cocaine … had and still has herpes … had and still has HPV … engaged in a debasing act with a beer bottle and … committed infidelity”.With jury selection having been completed on Monday – and Cardi B fans filtered out of the pool of potential jurors – the defamation trial got properly underway yesterday.With often forthright and sweary statements from Kebe’s videos crucial to the proceedings, her lawyer urged the jury to not be prejudiced against his client’s presentation style.According to Law360, attorney Sadeer Sabbak told jurors: “I ask you not to make any judgment about what the plaintiff is alleging Ms Kebe said until you actually hear the videos and the context, because context is everything, especially in the media.

Everyone is familiar with humour, everyone is familiar with opinion, and everyone needs context to appreciate that”.However, Almanzar’s lawyer, Sarah M Matz, insisted that, even in context, humour is no excuse here. “Saying people have highly stigmatic diseases is not a joke”, she mused. “Ms Kebe knows that statements like this, if false, are.