Lady Gaga’s plagiarism trial is coming to her hometown of Manhattan. Though the case has been proceeding largely under the radar in Chicago, Bill Niro, the plaintiff’s lawyer, tells Page Six exclusively that he’ll be in the city next week deposing experts who are confident that Gaga’s song “Judas” is a rip-off of a song by his client, Rebecca Francescatti.
“The case is proceeding along a schedule that is a little slow, but deliberate,” Niro tells Page Six. “We do have a strong case. This is a case of plagiarism.” And next week in New York, he will be deposing experts “who say that this music is substantially similar,” he says.
“What we claim and believe we can prove is that there are segments of Rebecca’s music and lyrics that have found their way into the song ‘Judas,’” Niro continues. “The refrain of ‘Judas’ … you slow it down and put it in the same key, [it] lines up exactly [with Francescatti’s song ‘Judah’]. Then there’s parts of our client’s violin part that musically the phrasing of the violin parts are virtually identical too.”
And Niro says it’s no coincidence. Francescatti’s song engineer, Bryan Gaynor, “worked on 90% of the songs on ‘Born This Way.’” And Gaynor’s close friend, DJ Whiteshadow, is currently on tour with Gaga.
After working with Francescatti, “Gaynor and DJ Whiteshadow were pitching songs to Gaga,” Niro explains. “This is electronic dance music. This is not the Beatles in a studio strumming guitars. The way it’s produced is they take tracks, bits, snips pieces samples and then use software and then they just layer it. They can manipulate that music. Speed it up, slow it down, change the pitch, change the key. It’s very easy to take somebody’s music, manipulate it a bit and just feed it right into another song.”
And Gaga was totally aware of what was going on, according to a recent piece by the Chicago Tribune
. The paper uncovered court transcripts that allege that Gaga sent texts to producer RedOne implying that she knew of the plagiarism. Her lawyers have since moved to seal that testimony.
Weirdly enough, Jennifer Lopez is also implicated in the scandal. Her song, “Invading My Mind,” allegedly includes a sample from “Judas” that Niro says came from Francescatti. “We discovered outside of the lawsuit that a portion of the song ‘Judas’ is similar to a portion of the song ‘Invading My Mind,” he says. According to the Chicago Tribune’s report, Gaga got Lopez to give her a producing credit on that song to cover her tracks.
Though Niro says Gaga won’t have to show up in court herself for several months, he’s confident that she’ll one day have to fess up to what his client believes she did. “It’s a David and Goliath fight,” he says. “Gaga’s off on tour making her millions but as this case proceeds, we think she’s going to have to start paying attention.”