What’s the matter — chicken?
A Manhattan lawyer has settled his defamation lawsuit against the “Opie and Anthony Show” host he said defamed him by calling him “stupid” and a “whore” who had sexual designs on feathered fowl.
“The chicken crossed the road because it thought that” lawyer Roy Den Hollander “would try to f— it,” is just one of the swipes foul-mouthed comedian Jim Norton took at Hollander on the satellite radio show last year.
Hollander’s suit said Norton’s diatribes “held him up to public contempt and disgrace and caused him personal humiliation, mental anguish and suffering.”
Under the terms of the deal, Hollander agreed to withdraw his suit and Norton agreed to withdraw a motion asking that Hollander be sanctioned $10,000 for filing a baseless action and ordered to pay Norton’s legal fees.
Hollander said he was confident he would’ve gotten Norton’s motion tossed out because it was flawed and “frivolous.” He was less sure about the overall chances his $500,000 defamation suit would have had because the judge seemed unsympathetic to his plight.
“The judge wasn’t too favorable towards the case, so I decided to quit while I was ahead,” he said.
“I figured Norton’s learned his lesson and he won’t mouth off as much … You don’t always have to win a case to win a case,” he said.
Norton’s lawyer did not return a call for comment.
Hollander – a self-proclaimed “anti-feminist lawyer” – said he’d never heard of Opie & Anthony before he agreed to go on the outrageous shock jocks’ show for what he thought would be an intelligent discussion about the merits of a suit he’d filed seeking to force Columbia University to drop its women’s studies program.
The appearance went south when Hollander, who’d unsuccessfully challenged “Ladies’ Nights” at nightclubs as being unconstitutional, defended affirmative action.
That’s when Norton laced into Hollander, calling him a “white dude hypocrite” and “a phony,” and saying he had “a fake wife to make like he’s heterosexual.”
He also went on Hollander’s MySpace page and started mocking his online friends, and gave out his e-mail address and encouraged listeners to “harass” him.
Hollander gave as good as he got in his lawsuit, where he blasted Norton as “a little known radio talk-show host, comedian, and a white person who is bigoted against African Americans,” and “uses cursing, yelling [and] bigotry” to “entertain immature and insecure audiences.”