HOUSTON (CN) — A former porn star whose career fizzled after a producer published she "used to be a man" wants $1 billion from Facebook and founder Mark Zuckerberg in a defamation lawsuit accusing them of spreading the lie.
Paree La'Tiejira, 41, appeared as "Lady Paree" in more than 200 pornography films produced and released by Leisure Time Entertainment in the early 1990s, court records show.
Leisure Time's owner Mark C. Carriere knows La'Tiejira is a woman because she started menstruating during a scene in April 1993 and the director stopped filming and called in Carriere to decide whether to cut the footage, according to the case record of a 2009 lawsuit La'Tiejira filed against Carriere and Leisure Time in Lake County, Indiana.
La'Tiejira won a $2.55 million judgment in that case. The court found that Carriere and Leisure Time defamed her by publishing an ad for their movie "Amazing Black Sex Changes" accompanied by a picture of La'Tiejira and this statement: "This black beauty used to be a man!"
That made her a porn-industry pariah, La'Tiejira said, an argument the Indiana court accepted, in its Jan. 13, 2010 "Court's Findings of Fact, Conclusions Thereon and Order." There, Lake County Judge Lorenzo Arredondo found that "several prospective employers who rejected her for new work explained that the rejections were the result of the false publications by defendants," and that employers canceled La'Tiejira's jobs already scheduled, including a month-long tour of Japan that was to pay her $30,000.
Her career dead, she moved from Los Angeles to Houston in 1995. It made her a target of unstable fans who have threatened her life and battered and assaulted her. One slashed her face, requiring 150 stitches to close, $140,000 in medical bills and a scar still visible today, Arredondo found.
La'Tiejira cites that disaster in her Aug. 23 pro se lawsuit in Houston Federal Court: "A former fan slashed La'Tiejira's face with a knife from her left temple to her lower left chin, while declaring he believed La'Tiejira used to be a man."
La'Tiejira, who is unemployed and does not have an attorney, says in the lawsuit that she cannot live down the lie because it's all over Facebook.
"The defendants herein, with actual knowledge that La'Tiejira is a woman, individually and collectively published and continue to publish false statements that she was born a man through the FB online platform operated and managed by FB and Zuckerberg," the complaint states.
She seeks $1 billion damages for defamation and emotional distress.
Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.
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