Entertainment

BLIND ITEM: someone in Hollywood is claiming IMDB.com ruined her career by publishing deleterious personal information about her. An anonymous actress is suing the Internet Movie Database and its parent company Amazon for breech of contract, fraud, and violation of privacy and consumer protection laws—and she's asking for a jaw-dropping $1 million in punitive damages plus $75,000 in compensatory damages.

The reason? Apparently, IMDB.com published her real age.

The actress, who we will refer to as Ms. X, says she looks younger than she really is, and that her job offers sharply declined once her date of birth was included in her IMDB information. It seems that when she bought an upgrade to IMDB Pro (which provides contact information specifically for entertainment industry professionals) in 2008, IMDb added her previously undisclosed date of birth to her profile, thus “revealing to the public that Plaintiff is many years older than she looks.”

Ms. X's lawsuit claims,

If one is perceived to be ‘over-the-hill,’ i.e., approaching 40, it is nearly impossible for an up-and-coming actress, such as the plaintiff, to get work as she is thought to have less of an ‘upside.'

As an over-the-hill woman myself, I find that a good, painful squat routine helps with those drooping upsides, but . . . okay, I guess I can see how she's frustrated, being as how the website just published her info without her consent, and—

Oh, wait. She's also suing because she looks too young.

Plaintiff has experienced rejection in the industry for each ‘40-year-old’ role for which she has interviewed because she does not and cannot physically portray the role of a 40-year-old woman.

Yeahhh, I'm going to go ahead and float the idea that the reason she's getting passed over for roles has less to do with her published age and more to do with the fact that she's not exactly Meryl Streep. Who, by the way, has no problems finding roles at 62 years old.

I know youth is valued in Hollywood, but if you're going to lie about your age to get roles, I'm pretty sure you should expect that it's eventually going to bite you in the ass. It seems to me that IMDB should be a trustworthy resource for factual information about actors, not a place for someone to fictionalize their personal details and job history. In fact, Ms. X really should have taken notes from famed age-fabricator Jenna Morgan on the massive effort it would require to cover all over her bases:

While I'm busy feeling mostly unsympathetic for Ms. X, should we take some guesses on who she might be? The lawsuit identifies her only as a "Texas resident of Asian descent," but that might just be to throw us off the trail. My top 3 picks:

Courtney Stodden. Come on, there's no WAY that lip-licking weirdo is a teenager.
Angelina Jolie. Maybe it's the mess of kids, maybe it's how much she's changed over the years, but I just can't wrap my head around the fact that she's only 36.
Lindsay Lohan. 25? More like 25 grams of coke, amirite?

What do you think about this lawsuit? Do you think Ms. X deserves to win?

Image via IMDB