LOS ANGELES - Actress-singer Jennifer Lopez has sued her first husband to stop him from publishing a proposed tell-all book that she says would breach an existing nondisclosure, "nondisparaging" agreement between them.
The lawsuit, filed on Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, claims the star's former spouse, Ojani Noa,
has been "shopping a manuscript containing private and intimate statements, many of which are negative, denigrating and disparaging, about his ex-wife."
Noa's plans for such a book were revealed in a January 2006 New York Post article, which included the claim that Lopez had carried on an affair with salsa singer Marc Anthony while he was still married to Puerto Rican model and beauty queen Dayanara Torres, the suit said.
Anthony and Lopez married in June 2004, just days after he was divorced from Torres, and five months after Lopez broke off her much-publicized engagement to actor Ben Affleck.
According to the lawsuit, the Post article describes Noa's "tell-all manuscript" as a 12-chapter book under the title: The Unknown Truth: A Passionate Portrait of a Serial Thriller.
Aside from the claim about a premarital affair with Anthony, the lawsuit gives no other specific examples of the "salacious, inflammatory, invasive, disparaging statements" it accuses Noa of making about Lopez, 36.
But it does say that he offered to refrain from pursuing his book deal in return for a US$5 million payment.
Noa's lawyer, David deRubertis, was not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit seeks a court order preventing Noa from selling or publishing a book about Lopez, saying such a book would violate the terms of an agreement he reached with Lopez in October settling a previous lawsuit he brought against her.
That settlement contained both a "nondisclosure" clause barring each party from revealing private details about the other for monetary gain, and a "non-disparagement" clause prohibiting either from criticizing the other publicly.
Noa sued Lopez in December 2004 for fraud and breach of contract, claiming she hired him to manage her new restaurant just long enough to get it up and running, then fired him without cause.
Lopez's 10-1/2-month marriage to Noa, the first of her three husbands, ended in divorce in January 1998. She married her second husband, dancer Chris Judd, in September 2001 and filed for divorce from him the following July.
- REUTERS
