The Game of Thrones star is seeking $40 million in damages, claiming the defendants “intentionally” ruined his acting career and personal reputation.
Game of Thrones actor Joseph Gatt has slapped the city of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Police Department, L.A. District Attorney George Gascón and others, with a lawsuit over dismissed pedophile charges.
The 52-year-old actor is after $40 million in damages over a 2022 arrest for a since-dismissed charge of “online sexually explicit communication with a minor across state lines.” He is suing for the alleged violation of his Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights, following what his lawyers call a “botched” investigation.
In the court documents which were filed in the Federal Court of California on Thursday, Gatt claims the defendants “intentionally” ruined his acting career and personal reputation “from a thoroughly botched criminal investigation, entirely lacking any probable cause.”
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Gatt claims Deputy District Attorney Angela Brunson wanted to destroy him due to “bias and personal animosity.”
He claims in the court documents, the “defendants’ conduct was purportedly based solely on the uncorroborated word of a then-16-year-old, admittedly obsessed fan of Gatt.”
Additionally, in his 38-page complaint the British actor alleges the defendants “publicly branded him as a serial pedophile” and more than 200 different media outlets picked up the story and reported on the “utterly false allegations.”
He claims he was subsequently dropped from his agent and PR representatives. Additionally he was fired from two films and was cut from all scenes in another film he had already shot.
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The suit claims the interaction between the pair started from a Cameo video Gatt recorded for the teen’s 16th birthday.
Shortly after, the then-minor — who lived in Washington — reached out to Gatt on Instagram to thank him for the Cameo video. The fan then contacted Gatt on a few other occasions, with the suit claiming Gatt replied “in a manner that was wholly appropriate and consistent with typical celebrity-fan exchanges.”
He claimed she then began to share “wholly manufactured fake conversations between herself and Gatt via the social media platform Snapchat that were sexual in nature and pure fantasy,” which were found by her older sister and reported to authorities.
The suit says as a celebrity, Gatt’s earning capacity is tied in part to social media engagement. It also says the actor never met the teen fan in person — and alleges the fan wasn’t even interviewed until a year after his arrest.
“Based solely on the allegations of a single, admittedly obsessed 16-year-old fan whom they had never bothered to interview to that point, along with facially untrustworthy photographs of alleged Snapchat conversations with that fan that they made no effort to verify against the actual electronic or online data relating to these alleged conversations, Defendants recklessly and publicly branded Gatt to the public as a serial pedophile,” reads the suit. “Even more egregiously, they did so even though they had already spent hours searching through Gatt’s personal phone and computer and had found no evidence whatsoever of any improper communications with Jane Doe or any other minor.”
