Tweet little rock'n'roller

PROFILE: COURTNEY LOVE: The troubled actor and rock star has been using Twitter to lay bare her personal life and vent her anger, but an upcoming libel case will test the boundaries of what you can say on social networks, writes BRIAN BOYD

THE BIO on Courtney Love’s Twitter account reads: “I Have Earned The Right To Sing The Blues”. The controversial musician, actor and widow of Kurt Cobain has indeed had a more picaresque life than most: a troubled childhood, rock stardom, drink and drug addiction, the early death of her husband, an eating disorder, losing custody of her child and various enforced lockdowns in rehab centres.

Always an outlandish, outrageous diva character with dual competing inferiority and superiority complexes, the 46-year-old American (who was partly brought up in Ireland) has strong opinions on everyone and everything – and she burns up Twitter on a daily basis to share these with the world.

Her Twitter feed (@colove1) is an eccentric, splatter-gun, consistently inconsistent affair that veers from Zen Buddhist moments of calm reflection to verbally violent character assaults on those around her.

Discretion would not be her watchword.

Love’s tweets have now landed her in a Los Angeles courtroom, where she is being sued by a fashion designer who says she was defamed and her career ruined by a Love tweet. This is the first time a high-profile celebrity has been sued over comments made on the micro-blogging website, and the implications of the case are enormous.

What is at stake, legally, is whether tweets are facts or opinions.

In a 2009 tweet Love allegedly called the fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir “a drug pushing prostitute” during a dispute over payment for clothes. It is also alleged that, via her tweets, Love claimed that Simorangkir had a history of assault and battery and had lost custody of her own child and capitalised on Love’s fame before stealing from her. “She has received a vast amount of money from me – over 40,000 dollars and I do not make people famous and get raped TOO” is the alleged Love tweet.

Simorangkir claims that Love's tweets about her were false and have destroyed her reputation in the fashion world. Her lawyer, Bryan Freedman, told the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog that the upcoming case is a first of its kind that will test whether people will be held to a lower standard of accuracy merely because they made the comment on Twitter.

“Defamation is not judged by what form it’s in but rather is judged by the accuracy of a statement itself,” says Freedman.

Love's lawyer, James Janowitz, argues that this will not be a groundbreaking case and says that, while Love's tweets are "graphic" and "colourful", they were "by and large not defamatory". He told the Hollywood Reporter: "We had an opportunity to measure the plaintiff's business and how it was affected [by Love's comments] and it wasn't. It's the old adage: there is no bad publicity as long as they spell your name right."

There are numerous other factors to the case, with commentators saying that it is not just Love who will be in the dock but Twitter itself. The latest figures for the site show that it has 190 million users who generate 65 million tweets a day; due to the very nature of tweets – often highly opinionated – the potential for defamation is always present.

In recognition of the rise of Twitter, the UK supreme court passed a judgment last month acknowledging that defamation law must be updated to take into account the rise of new technologies. Lord Phillips, the court’s president, said: “Today the internet has made it possible for the man in the street to make public comment about others in a manner that did not exist when the principles of the law of fair comment were developed.”

A social-media expert, Jessie Stricchiola, is due to be called to the stand during Love’s trial to talk about what kind of credibility is usually given to statements made on Twitter. What will be important here is how much influence Love has as a musical and fashion celebrity, how many people read the alleged tweets, how often they were retweeted and how they were understood by the Twitter community.

It is alleged that Love’s attorneys will call their own witnesses, including a medical expert who will testify that the singer’s mental state was not “subjectively malicious” enough to justify the defamation lawsuit. Which could be interpreted by some as a watered-down insanity defence for social-media users.

Love is a Twitter disciple. Such are the volume and the frequently garbled content of her tweets that the Washington Postnewspaper ran a feature this week that attempted to "decode" her online ramblings.

A Love tweet from December 31st that reads, “no trouble, buy property, make art, babies be heroic everyday, get my stray sheparded [sic] into a school and rock some words. smoking too, surf?” they decode as New Year’s resolutions with the “stray” possibly referring to her teenage daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.

A day later Love tweets: “oh my god, if i had had a college education none of the money would be stolen and my husband would be alive, dont joke” which the paper describes as “self-explanatory”.

Love has a flair for the melodramatic and the portentous. There's a lyric on her latest album, released last year, that goes, "I've been tortured and scorned since the day I was born." The reality is a bit more prosaic: she was brought up in a series of countercultural hippy communes before pitching up in Dublin at the age of 16. She had fallen in love with a U2 song, I Will Follow, and wanted to be closer to the band; also, her biological father (who used to work with The Grateful Dead) was living in Drogheda.

Living between Drogheda and a squat on St Stephen's Green for a number of years, she says she talked her way into a job at Windmill Lane, working with U2, enrolled at Trinity College to study theology and worked as a photographer for Hot Press. No one we have spoken to who was at Windmill Lane, Trinity or Hot Press at the time can remember her.

She moved to the UK, where she became a well-known figure on the music scene before returning to the US to form the all-female grunge rock band Hole in the early 1990s. She ran into the rising star Kurt Cobain and the two began a tempestuous relationship. They married in 1992 and had their daughter, Frances Bean. After Cobain's death she became a star in her own right with Hole and later won acclaim for her acting skills in Milos Foreman's The People Vs Larry Flynt.

Because of allegations of heroin use, Love couldn’t get insured for the film and had to pay her own premiums – as well as consent to weekly urine tests. The wild-child image followed her through the 1990s, when there were frequent reports of arrests, violent attacks and rehab orders.

What hasn’t helped her case over the years as she had tried to shake off the tag of being the most controversial woman in rock’n’roll is how she goes public (at some length, and in some detail) about her various addictions, her arrests and how and why she lost custody of her daughter (who is now 18). In the early days of the internet she would appear all over web forums, authoring frequently incomprehensible screeds on the most personal aspects of her life. An instant and quick service such as Twitter was only ever going to allow her even greater personal exposure.

By her own confession hyperactive and with an acute attention-deficit disorder, she is, if you meet her in person, a bundle of the shockingly confessional (talking freely about her affairs with A-list stars and ranking them sexually) and alarming inconsistency (at one moment close to tears explaining how broke she is, then five minutes later saying she is worth $110 million).

It was no surprise to read last Tuesday, as she prepared for her trial, that Love was abandoning Twitter. Her last tweet was, “the end.am shutting down all social media tomorrow first thing, from here on in i have NO Comment, includes FB”.

And there’s something you don’t see every day: Courtney Love says “no comment”.

Curriculum vitae

NameCourtney Michelle Harrison. She's related on her mother's side to Douglas Fairbanks. She was renamed Love by hippies in the commune she grew up in.

OccupationFamous for being infamous. Her music career seems to have spluttered out, but she hopes to return to acting, noting: "If Robert Downey jnr can get out of movie prison, maybe I can, too."

TroubleShe's been a bit overactive on her Twitter account and is now due in court to face defamation charges over a tweet about a fashion designer.

Social networkingBecause she's closed down her Twitter account, we'll have to make do with boring press reports of the trial and not Love's own colourful take on the proceedings.