Madonna Loses Fight Over Shakur Letter

Madonna has lost a legal battle to prevent the auction of her intimate memorabilia, including satin underwear and a letter from her former boyfriend, rapper Tupac Shakur.

In July 2017, a New York Supreme Court judge, Gerald Lebovits, granted Madonna a preliminary injunction blocking the sale of 22 items that she described as “extremely private and personally sensitive.”

But in a decision made public Monday, Lebovits dismissed the case on the grounds that the statute of limitations to recover the items had passed. The belongings, which also included intimate photographs, a hairbrush and cassette tapes of unreleased recordings, were set to be sold by the online auction site GottaHaveRockandRoll.com last year.

“We did substantial due diligence when we took all the Madonna items for auction,” Edward Kosinski and Pete Siegel, the owners of GottaHaveRockandRoll.com, said in a statement provided to The New York Times. “We were confident that Madonna had no claim whatsoever, and the judge clearly agreed with us.”

The auction house said the online sale of the items will now go ahead in July. The starting bid for the handwritten Shakur letter is $100,000.

Some of the items were provided for the sale by Darlene Lutz, Madonna’s former friend and art consultant, who was also named as a defendant in the suit. Monday’s ruling also said that a 2004 settlement agreement between Lutz and Madonna prevented the singer from suing for the items.

Reached by email, Lutz’s lawyer, Judd B. Grossman, said the decision was a “total victory.” He added, “The court was clear that Madonna may no longer interfere with the sale of Lutz’s property.”

Lutz, in an interview Tuesday, said, “I had a 20-year relationship with Madonna, professional and personal.” She recalled the pair becoming friendly in the downtown Manhattan art scene of the early 1980s, and said that she realized early on “that everything that came into contact with Madonna could be important.”

“Because of my art history background, I knew that everything connected to an artist has some relevance or will have relevance,” Lutz said by phone. “I had been a stalwart in hammering her to protect her own legacy, create her own archive.”

However, Lutz added, “She didn’t take the route that Beyoncé did” — a reference to the pop star’s exhaustive personal archiving system.

Madonna’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The singer had previously said she did not know Lutz was in possession of the items until last year when the gossip site TMZ published the letter from Shakur.

Dated Jan. 15, 1995, the letter was written during Shakur’s incarceration at New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility for sexual assault, the year before his shooting death at age 25 in September 1996. In the letter, he alludes to his reasons for ending a relationship with Madonna.

“For you to be seen with a black man wouldn’t in any way jeopardize your career, if anything it would make you seem that much more open and exciting,” Shakur wrote. “But for me at least in my previous perception I felt due to my ‘image’ I would be letting down half of the people who made me what I thought I was.”

A second letter in the lot was an unsent draft written by Madonna to another former boyfriend, actor John Enos. In it Madonna described two of her rivals, Whitney Houston and Sharon Stone, as “horribly mediocre,” adding, “They’re always being held up as paragons of virtue and some sort of measuring stick to humiliate me.” Lutz said she came into possession of the items while frequently hanging around during that time in Madonna’s orbit, where she “tended to be a repository for a lot of stuff where people just thought: ‘Get rid of it.'” That included large piles of fan mail that were often not examined at all, Lutz said. “I knew all of the assistants and stuff would get thrown in boxes and they would just go, ‘Hey, here’s some more.'”

Lutz said she did not even discover the Shakur letter until 2007 or 2008. By then, she and Madonna had fallen out — they had not seen each other in more than a decade until the depositions in this case, Lutz said — though she continued to recognize the singer’s artistic importance, and therefore the demand for items from her past.

“There’s no question: Madonna is an artist who shifted culture,” Lutz said. “I was there, and I helped.”