Bristol Palin faces another lawsuit over reality series
Bristol Palin, daughter of former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, is facing yet another lawsuit due to her “deliberate, malicious and despicable” actions which resulted in emotional distress to the plaintiff.
According to reports, the plaintiff, talent manager Stephen Hanks, filed the legal docs on June 28. He is seeking unnamed compensatory damages, emotional distress damages and punitive damages from Bristol Palin. Hanks filed the lawsuit the first time in U.S federal court in Los Angeles on June 13, following aired promos of Lifetime which features him and Palin in a widely publicized heated verbal argument at a West Hollywood bar. Hanks said that the incident was filmed back in September 2011 without his permission, subsequently demanding Lifetime to cease airing the said footage. Bristol Palin was reportedly thrown from the bar’s famed mechanical bull when suddenly, Stephen Hanks, who happens to be a customer there as well, yelled, “Did you ride Levi like that?! Your mother’s a w*ore!”
A camera crew was able to catch the action as Bristol Palin, smiling at first, marched over to confront the guy, who proudly introduced himself later as Stephen Hanks. As E! online transcribed it:
“What’d you say?” Bristol Palin asked Stephen Hanks. “Your mother’s the f–king devil,” Hanks shouted. “She lives, she breaths,” he retorted, when Bristol asked what her mother had done wrong.
“You want her dead?” she asked. Hanks answered, “If there is a hell…she will be there…She’s evil.”
Bristol Palin then asked, “Is it because you’re a homosexual?” Hanks said, “Pretty much,” to which Bristol exclaimed, “And that’s why you hate her.”
When asked why Bristol thought Hanks was homosexual, she said, “Because I can tell you are. That’s a nice wife you’ve got there,” she added, referring to the man next to him.
However, Stephen Hanks eventually dropped the federal lawsuit when he “learned of additional defendants” only to be filed the case in state court right away. As reported by Deadline, Bristol Palin, Lifetime’s parent company A&E Television network, series production company Associated Television International, and “Life’s A Tripp” executive producer David McKenzie are all being sued. In his 15-page civil complaint, Stephen Hanks claims that Bristol Palin’s “deliberate, malicious and despicable” actions, he has “suffered harm to his profession and occupation and expended money as a result of the statements.” During an interview, Bristol Palin told celebrity magazine In Touch that the incident at the bar was one of the reasons why she decided to leave Los Angeles and return to her home in Wasilla, Alaska instead.
In the exclusive interview with In Touch, Bristol said that she was approached by a man at the Saddle Ranch in Los Angeles and said nasty insults to her about her prominent family. After her verbal altercation with Stephen Hanks went viral, Bristol Palin realized that she was done with showbiz and that she had never felt completely at home in the Lower 48. “I wasn’t really into the Hollywood thing,” Bristol said. “After that, I just realized that I was over it. I was ready to come home.”
However, Hanks alleges in his lawsuit that Bristol Palin had bought a new house in Alaska back in July 2011, and that she had defamed him in public by putting the blame on their encounter for her decision to leave Los Angeles. This is said to be the second lawsuit filed against “Life’s A Tripp” in the past month. Bristol’s former “Dancing With The Stars” castmate Kyle Massey, brother Christopher and mother Angela also filed a lawsuit against the producers of Bristol Palin’s show, charging that the Masseys generated the concept and started shooting a series which involved them and Bristol, only to be “erased.” However, unlike Stephen Hanks, Bristol was not named as a defendant in the 31-page lawsuit filed at the Los Angeles Superior Court against Associated Television International, Helping hands LLC and David McKenzie.