Lady Gaga, producer end their dueling NY lawsuits; he’d said she cut him out of her career

Lady Gaga, producer withdraw dueling NY lawsuits

NEW YORK — They may have had a bad romance, but now there’s a cordial professional split between Lady Gaga and a music producer who said she ditched him as both a collaborator and a boyfriend after he helped launch her career.

Court papers filed this week show the Grammy Award-winning “Bad Romance” singer and songwriter-producer Rob Fusari agreed to dismiss the lawsuits each filed against the other in March in a Manhattan court.

He’d sought $30.5 million, but it’s unclear whether they made any monetary deal.

“Lady Gaga and Rob Fusari have agreed to end their dispute amicably and wish each other well. There will be no further comment by either of them,” the singer’s camp said in a statement. A lawyer for Fusari didn’t immediately respond to phone and e-mail messages Friday.

Fusari had said the pop-meets-performance-art sensation shoehorned him out of her lucrative career after he co-wrote such Gaga hits as “Paparazzi” and “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,” came up with her stage name and helped get her record deal.

Fusari — who has a producing credit on Lady Gaga’s 2008 debut album, “The Fame” — met the singer two years before when she was still Stefani Germanotta, according to his lawsuit. He has a studio in Parsippany, N.J.

He said they forged both a romantic and a business relationship, both soured, and he was denied money their contract had entitled him to, including a 20 percent share of her song royalties. He said he’d gotten about $611,000 but was due far more.

“All business is personal,” his lawsuit said. “When those personal relationships evolve into romantic entanglements, any corresponding business relationship usually follows the same trajectory so that when one crashes they all burn. That is what happened here.”

Lady Gaga’s lawyers had said Fusari was just an agent for her and got the then-inexperienced singer to sign an unfair agreement in 2006. Her lawsuit asked a court to void the “unlawful arrangement,” or at least declare that Fusari wasn’t owed what he claimed.

Lady Gaga won two Grammys in January: best dance recording, for “Poker Face,” and best electronic/dance album, for “The Fame.” She leads the field of nominees with 13 nods for this year’s MTV Video Music Awards; the awards broadcast is set for Sunday.

Besides his work with Lady Gaga, Fusari has credits on such hits as Will Smith’s “Wild, Wild West” and Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious.”