Samantha Ronson (born 7 August 1977) is a female English-American singer-songwriter and disc jockey who currently lives in Los Angeles.

Early life

Ronson was born into a wealthy family in London, the daughter of writer-socialite Ann Dexter-Jones and one-time band manager and real estate entrepreneur Laurence Ronson.

Career

Ronson spun live for MTV's New Year's Eve 2001 show from the network's studios in Times Square. In 2002, it was announced Duncan Sheik would be co-producing an album for Ronson that would be out in the spring. In 2004, she opened for JC Chasez on his Schizophrenic tour.

Ronson became the first rock act signed to Roc-A-Fella Records.. She released four songs under the label "Super" with very little public interest: "Pull My Hair Out", "Fool", "If It's Gonna Rain" and "Built This Way," and wrote and recorded her first album, 'Red. "Built This Way" was featured in the movie Mean Girls starring Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams. Although Red was never officially released song downloads were made available from her MySpace page. Ronson has also made a number of appearances on mix tapes produced by artists on the Roc-A-Fella label. In a January 2008 interview with MTV News, it was revealed Ronson had parted ways with her label and is currently focusing on DJing.

Ronson is co-owner of the New York City nightclub The Plumm, along with actor Chris Noth among others.

Legal Actions

On May 26, 2007 Lindsay Lohan crashed her Mercedes-Benz in Beverly Hills. Police found a small amount of cocaine in her car and blogger Perez Hilton posted on his blog that the drugs belonged to Ronson, using another celebrity gossip blog as a source for the story. Two weeks later he started selling "Blame Samantha" t-shirts and called Ronson a "lezbot dj". Ronson hired Martin Garbus for $750 an hour and started a defamation suit against Perez Hilton and against the original source for the story, Celebrity Babylon. Celebrity Babylon agreed to issue a retraction and an apology in exchange of Ronson dropping her claim, Perez Hilton's lawyers on the other side asked the judge to throw out the case as an assault on his 1st Amendment rights. Garbus thought that it would be impossible to produce evidence that Hilton had acted with malice and reached an agreement with Hilton which would have kept Ronson from paying his legal fees. Ronson wanted Hilton's retraction and vetoed the proposal. Around the same time Garbus presented his bill, despite the $25,000 retainer Ronson now owed him $100,000. Garbus decided to withdraw from the case when he didn't see his money forthcoming and neither he nor Ronson appeared at Hilton's hearing, where the judge ruled in Hilton's favour dismissing the case and ordering Ronson to pay Hilton's $85,000 legal fees.

Two weeks later Garbus sued Ronson in New York for close to $142,000 in fees and services. He later dropped that suit. In May, Ronson filed suit against Garbus in Los Angeles County Superior Court, contending that his incompetence had lost the case against Hilton and asking for damages in excess of $300,000. Among the allegations was that Garbus failed to fulfill his duties as her attorney because he was focused on collecting his fees. In response to Ronson's malpractice suit he countersued to recover his fees.