Lopez wins arbitration against former husband

09/08/2007 17:37

By Dana Ford

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Singer-actress Jennifer Lopez has won roughly $545,000 (267,608 pounds) in the arbitration of a lawsuit against her first husband over his plans to publish a tell-all book about the star, court documents showed on Wednesday.

As part of the arbitrator’s decision, Lopez also won a permanent injunction barring her ex-spouse, Ojani Noa, from disclosing intimate information about their relationship for personal gain.

Among the revelations purportedly made in the ghost-written book, according to media accounts, was that Lopez had multiple affairs during her brief marriage to Noa, including one with salsa-singer Marc Anthony, Lopez’s third and current husband, while he also was married to someone else.

Anthony and Lopez, 38, married in June 2004, just days after he was divorced from Dayanara Torres, a Puerto Rican model and beauty queen, and five months after Lopez broke off her much-publicized engagement to actor Ben Affleck.

Lopez sued Noa, 31, in June 2006 to stop him from publishing the book, claiming it violated the terms of a nondisclosure, "non-disparagement" agreement the two had reached under a previous legal settlement.

The arbitration of their latest dispute makes permanent an injunction Lopez obtained against the book’s publication in June 2006.

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he respects the order of the court," said Paul Sorrell, attorney for Lopez. "If he doesn’t, it won’t be over."

Sorrell filed papers in a Los Angeles County Superior Court on Monday asking a judge to affirm the arbitration.

Lopez was awarded $200,000 in damages for breach of contract, $300,000 in attorneys’ fees and nearly $48,000 in arbitration costs.

Noa’s plans for a book were revealed in a January 2006 article in the New York Post describing the proposed expose as a 12-chapter "tell-all manuscript" under the title: "The Unknown Truth: A Passionate Portrait of a Serial Thriller."

Noa, a restaurant and nightclub manager, offered not to publish the book if Lopez paid him $5 million, according to Lopez’s suit.

Lopez divorced Noa in 1998 after 11 months of marriage. She married her second husband, dancer Chris Judd, in September 2001 and filed for divorce from him the following July.

Lopez and Anthony star together in "El Cantante," a movie about salsa legend Hector Lavoe that opened in U.S. cities this summer.

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