The playwright pal who found Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s body after his apparent fatal drug overdose filed a $50 million libel suit Wednesday over a National Enquirer report that claims the men were secretly gay lovers.
Court papers filed on behalf of David Bar Katz call the article “one of the most reprehensible examples of yellow journalism by the National Enquirer” and says “the generally unseemly coverage of Hoffman’s death now seems restrained in light of this new outrage.”
According to the weekly’s Feb. 17 edition, Katz told the Enquirer that he and Hoffman were “homosexual lovers” and that he saw Hoffman smoke freebase cocaine Saturday night, shortly before his body was discovered Sunday on a bathroom floor in his $9,800-a-month Greenwich Village apartment, with a hypodermic needle stuck in his arm.
The Enquirer article also claims that Katz said he had “partied with Hoffman a number of times and had seen him do heroin ‘but I never thought his addiction had reached that level.'”
According to the Manhattan Supreme Court filing, submitted in boldface type:
“THE STORY IS A COMPLETE FABRICATION: THERE WAS NO INTERVIEW. BAR KATZ HAS NEVER SPOKEN TO ANYONE AT THE ENQUIRER ABOUT HOFFMAN. BAR KATZ AND HOFFMAN WERE NEVER LOVERS. BAR KATZ DID NOT SEE HOFFMAN FREEBASING COCAINE THE NIGHT BEFORE HE DIED, OR AT ANY OTHER TIME. BAR KATZ NEFVER SAW HOFFMAN USE HEROIN OR COCAINE.”
Katz’s lawyer, Judd Burstein, blasted the report as “a stomach-turning, egregious use of a tragedy to make a quick buck.”
“David and his family were very close to Phil and his family, and everybody is in the deepest of mourning,” Burstein said.
“One can only imagine David’s horror of having to discover his friend — and then to have been victimized by these pseudo-journalists.”
The suit targets the Enquirer’s Manhattan-based parent company, privately held American Media Inc.
Neither American Media nor the Enquirer immediately returned requests for comment.