Pitchfork reports that the Los Angeles County Supreme Court denied Ariel Pink’s request for civil harassment restraining orders against his ex-girlfriend Charlotte Ercoli Coe on January 6. Pink’s bid was ruled to be dismissed and stated that Coe is entitled to “reasonable attorney’s fees and costs.”
Ariel Pink filed for the restraining orders on August 10, 2020, alleging that Coe had been “falsely claiming he was a sexual ‘predator’ and falsely claiming to mutual friends and to [Pink] that he committed sexual offenses almost three years ago for which she has threatened to report [Pink] to police authorities.” Additionally, Pink alleged that Coe had “directly threatened” and “attempted to blackmail him with false allegations of sexual misconduct to his record label and financial supporters, to the media, including Pitchfork and Variety, and to the general public.”
The restraining orders petition claimed that the most recent harassment had reportedly occurred from “July 29, 2020 up through present,” and is stated to have involved a letter she sent to his record label, Mexican Summer. He was recently dropped from the label after the controversy began over his presence in Washington, D.C. during the Trump Rally on January 6. Coe’s letter had allegedly been sent to the label for a different reason but the same intent, which, according to the petition, was the “intent of having [Pink] dismissed from the label.”
Coe was also Pink’s bandmate at the time they were dating, and Pink had admitted to fighting and inappropriate on-stage behavior with her in 2017. She mentioned that incident and made some other allegations involving physical and mental abuse during their relationship, which all came out during her motion to strike the recent restraining order case. She works as videographer and records music as a solo musician.
California’s “Anti-SLAPP” statute was cited for the dismissal order. The statute intends to discourage lawsuits that are filed as an intimidation tactic, created due to an increase in “lawsuits brought primarily to chill the valid exercise of the constitutional rights of freedom of speech and petition for the redress of grievances.”
Photo credit: Raymond Flotat
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