A Los Angeles judge said Monday that Lady Gaga will not have to pay Jennifer McBride — the woman who pleaded no contest to receiving stolen property after Gaga’s French bulldogs were stolen at gunpoint — after she sued her over a $500,000 reward to return the pups.
“The allegations in the complaint are directly related to wrongful conduct that plaintiff pleaded guilty to in the criminal proceeding,” the judge wrote in their ruling. “Under the circumstances, plaintiff’s successful pursuit of her current claims would allow her to benefit from her admitted wrongdoing.”
The judge also argued that McBride could not “profit from her participation in a crime.” A judge threw out the breach of contract claim after Lady Gaga sought dismissal of the lawsuit in June, per ABC.
A rep for Lady Gaga did not return Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
McBride was one of five co-defendants charged in the dognapping case. McBride returned the dogs to police days after they were stolen. She claimed she randomly found Gaga’s dogs tied to a pole and reached out when she saw the offer of a reward for their return. McBride pleaded no contest to receiving stolen property in connection to the theft in December. She received two years of probation.
In her civil lawsuit she claimed that Gaga had made a binding “unilateral” agreement to pay the reward to the person who found the pups and was obligated to pay the money.
“The law does not allow a person to commit a crime and then profit from it,” Gaga’s lawyers at the firm Gibson Dunn wrote in their filings, per Billboard. “This principle applies with extra force in this case because the theft of Defendant’s dogs was facilitated by a violent gun crime that left one man nearly dead.”
Meanwhile, in December of last year, James Howard Jackson — the man who shot Gaga’s dogwalker Ryan Fischer — pleaded no contest to attempted murder with great bodily injury and admitted to a prior strike, and was sentenced to 21 years in prison.
Another co-defendant, fellow dognapper Jaylin White, accepted a surprise plea deal and was sentenced to four years in state prison.
In February, McBride alleged in a complaint that the singer defrauded her into turning in the pets with the promise that no questions would be asked if the pets were returned.
The judge has given McBride 20 days to try to amend the complaint.
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