Limp Bizkit’s Wes Borland Rebuked Over ‘Frivolous’ Legal Motion
A JUDGE HAS dismissed Limp Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland‘s request to sanction his ex-wife, Carré Kwong Callaway over opinions expressed in an album review, as well as an interview she gave to Bandcamp Daily.
In January, a judge heard Borland’s claims that Callaway, a musician who records as Queen Kwong, violated an anti-defamation clause in their divorce agreement by describing how a song on her recent Couples Only album referenced the grief she felt for a cat that had died after Borland made her leave the marital home within three days with the rescue animal. Borland, who also fronts his own band, Big Dumb Face, also objected to a Flood magazine review that suggested one song, “Emdr Atm,” could have been about his alleged “gaslighting” of her. The statements, he claimed, damaged the “public image and reputation” of the “Break Stuff” and “Nookie” songwriter.
“She’d been living with him in Detroit, with a whole host of cats they’d rescued, only to be forced out of the house they’d made their home,” the review said. “She was given three days to move out, to rehouse all the cats, to say goodbye to a life and a marriage and a husband she thought she knew. She was also ostracized by those in the music industry who felt they stood more to gain by being friends with Borland than with her.”
“The court does not find that [Callaway] made any defamatory statements regarding [Borland],” Judge Helal A. Farhat of the Third Judicial Circuit, Family Division, in Wayne County in Michigan said in the ruling. “In the Bandcamp Daily article, [Callaway] expressed her opinions, frustrations, and the struggles of her divorce from [Borland]. Ms. Callaway did not specifically indicate that [Borland] was the cause of her being ‘broke and homeless.’ All other statements referenced in [Borland’s] motion are either [Callaway’s] reflection of her feelings or insinuations made by authors. Statement [sic] that simply do not rise to the level of being defamatory. As to the Flood magazine article, same was imply an assessment of [Callaway’s] music and the author’s conclusionary statements based on the original Bandcamp article interview.”