Brit vs. Brit Press

(E! Online)
Updated: 2007-03-23 15:20

Los Angeles - Britney Spears' rehab stint is over. But is the press' coverage of the rehab stint over?

Spears' lawyers don't seem to think so.

The pop star's legal team asked, and got, a British court on Thursday to bar the media there from publishing stories featuring supposedly insider information about Spears' month-long stay at a California treatment center, reports said.

The move is aimed at stifling an unidentified mole or moles who has (or have) been making "false allegations," in the words of Spears' lawyers.

There was no word of a similar injunction being sought against media outlets in the native homeland of the Louisiana-born Spears. And there might be a good reason for that.

In the United States, according to Sandra Baron, executive director of the New York-based Media Law Resource Center, courts just don't pull the prior-restraint card on publications.

"It's virtually unheard of," Baron said Thursday. "They don't do it in national security cases. They certainly wouldn't do it in privacy cases."

Privacy has been especially hard for Spears to come by since her public meltdown last month. The singer has been tracked from hair salon to tattoo parlor to rehab to not-so-anonymous Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Whispers about Spears' allegedly diva-like behavior inside Malibu's famed Promises treatment facility made their way into U.S. magazines such as Star and Us Weekly.

Some whispers apparently also made their way into the British press as Spears' camp wasn't just launching a preemptive strike on Thursday, but promising some retroactive retribution.

Spears' U.K. lawyers said the pop star "intends to challenge false allegations that have already been published," the BBC reported.

It was not clear which reports and what allegations had Spears' camp in a fighting mood.

Spears, 25, checked out of Promises on Tuesday. The Grammy-winner never publicly said why she checked in.

That decision apparently was, to paraphrase a 2004 Spears cover track, her prerogative.



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