Rihanna vs her father

TMZ broke the news yesterday that Rihanna is suing her father, Ronald Fenty. Ronald has started an entertainment company and is allegedly leveraging Rihanna’s fame for profit,without her consent:

在一个新的诉讼——通过TMZ蕾哈娜班ims her father, Ronald Fenty, recently started a talent development company in 2017 called Fenty Entertainment. The problem ... Rihanna has already trademarked "Fenty" to use in a number of biz ventures, including her well-known Fenty Beauty line. She claims he's profiting off the reputation she's created with Fenty.

In the docs, Rihanna says her father and a business partner falsely advertised themselves as her reps to solicit millions of dollars, including trying to book her for 15 shows in Latin America in December 2017 for $15 mil ... all without her authorization.

Rihanna claims later her dad even unsuccessfully tried to file a trademark for "Fenty" to use with resort boutique hotels.

She says she's sent multiple cease and desist letters to her father, ordering him to stop capitalizing off of her Fenty trademarks, but says he's ignored them and continued to make money off of Fenty Entertainment.

She's asking a judge to place an injunction on her dad using the name Fenty ... and, of course, for damages.

Is this cold to sue your father? Should daughters always respect their fathers to honour what their fathers did to raise them? Well.

Rihanna has had a tumultuous relationship with dad over the years. She’s talked in the past about him abusing her mother and you’ll recall her cover story inVogueback in 2011when she told the magazine of her disappointment that her dad was selling photos of her to the media and also talking to the press about what Chris Brown did to her, without reaching out to her first. Here’s arefresher via Rap-Up, how she explained what she was going through back then:

“It really makes me question what I have become to my father. Like, what do I even mean to him?” a tearful Rihanna told the magazine. “It’s really strange. That’s the only word I can think of to describe it, because you grow up with your father, you know him, you are a part of him, for goodness’ sakes! And then he does something so bizarre that I can’t begin to wrap my mind around it. You hear the horror stories about people going behind people’s backs and doing strange things, but you always think, Not my family. My father would never do that to me.”

While she has a hard time grasping his motive, this is not the first time he has betrayed her. After Chris Brown assaulted her two years ago, Fenty called up the media to offer his two cents. “That was the first time,” she continued. “My dad went to the press and just told them a bunch of lies. Because he hadn’t talked to me after…that whole thing…. He never called to find out how I was doing, if I was alive, nothing. He just never called. He went straight to the press and got a check. And now he does it again.”

Sound familiar? Meghan Markle might be able to relate. As I keep saying, for those of you who are all about family first – of course, that’s true, when your family members aren’t assholes, when they aren’t repeatedly showing you their ass. If you have a hard time understanding, you’re lucky, because you’re part of a healthy family, with parents who don’t cause you pain. But those who have not been so fortunate will recognise this immediately. Not every person who ends up with a child becomes a good parent. (And the fact that we have to use “good” as a qualifier for “parent” is sad as f-ck, because “good” should be inherent in the word “parent”.) Some people are sh-tty parents and they do sh-tty things to their kids.

So to go back to the question of whether or not it was cold for Rihanna to sue her father – here’s a man who cashed in on her trauma, and is now cashing in on the empire she’s built, once again without bothering to consult with her. Why wouldn’t she protect her work, her assets, her brand, the brand that she made? Why shouldn’t she use the resources at her disposal to safeguard what she’s created from someone who’s trying to steal from her, even if that person is her father?

Attached – Rihanna last night out in New York. Apparently she went to the dentist. There’s a celebrity perk: dentist appointments whenever you want. I would so love it if I could get in to see the dentist at like 9pm instead of killing two hours in the middle of the day.