On October 28, a student newspaper at Salt Lake Community College printed an erroneous story on Sophia Stewart's RICO lawsuit against The Wachowskis, Jim Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd, Fox and Warner Bros and others.
Poorly reported by one Martha Carter, the story says that "Monday, October 4th 2004 ended a six-year dispute" and that Ms. Stewart has " will recover damages" and that "she will soon receive one of the biggest payoffs in the history of Hollywood, as the gross receipts of both films and their sequels total over 2.5 billion dollars."
None of that is true. What is true is that on September 27, 2004, US District Court Judge Margaret M. Morrow made a preliminary ruling that the RICO element of the suit would not be thrown out on purely legal grounds, though some of the charges were dropped against Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox. There was no finding of fact emerging from this hearing and not even the glimmer of a trial that would find guilt or innocence.
The story ran on the community college website, was picked up by Manhunt.com, which bills itself as "The digital resource for blazin' urban news." Eventually their story was passed to and published by Ain't It Cool News. By the time I was alerted to the posting and went to AICN, the link was gone. Presumably, someone explained just how inaccurate the story was and AICN did the responsible thing at that point.
If you want to look at the ruling, you can read it all on MCN... Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
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