Lawyer and counsellor, Kwaku Yamoah-Paintsil, has weighed in the possibility of rapper Sarkodie suing actress Yvonne Nelson for her book, I am not Yvonne Nelson.
According to the lawyer, if Sarkodie believes that the things written about him in the book are false, he can go to court.
He, however, noted that going to court is not enough. The rapper should be able to prove that whatever was written about him has caused him harm.
“The publication must be based on wrong facts. In other words the publication must be untrue. Truth does not defame. If you are a thief and I call you a thief, it is not defamation,” he said on Joy FM’s entertainment analysis programme, Showbiz A-Z.
“If the gentleman against who the statement was made [Sarkodie] thinks that those statements are somewhere offensive to him, then it is not enough for him to go to court. For him to be able to go to court, he must be able to say that those statements she made are not based on true facts. And that those untruth has tarnished his image. In the minds of the right thinking people in the society and of course it has damaged his reputation to a point where the court ought to award damages to him,” Lawyer Paintsil told the host Kwame Dadzie.
Actress Yvonne Nelson has mentioned in her book which was recently launched that she had an affair with rapper Sarkodie in 2010, a relationship which resulted in pregnancy.
In the book, she recounts her decision to terminate the pregnancy because the rapper did not accept responsibility.
“I wasn’t the only one responsible for the situation, so I called the man whose potent seed had germinated in me. His name is Michael Owusu Addo, a renowned Ghanaian musician who is better known as Sarkodie,” she further states in the book.
According to the actress, “Sarkodie was a budding musician with the potential to become one of the biggest artists in Ghana and beyond.
“At the time, however, the future looked uncertain and his way through the maze of life still appeared too foggy to predict. Success was not guaranteed. He was still living with his mother and was not ready to carry a burden while he was being carried by his mother.”
That notwithstanding, Yvonne indicates that their relationship was not a serious one.
“I wouldn’t call what had developed between us a serious relationship. I gravitated toward people in the music industry. For the longest time in my life, music was my getaway from all the unpleasant things life threw at me. So, I liked his talent. We started talking and got close. Closer,” she writes.
Yvonne Nelson mentions that the incident which happened when she was 25 and at a time her acting career had taken off in earnest, interrupted humanitarian ventures she had embarked on and other opportunities she had in Nigeria.
Her book chronicles her struggles while growing up, her battle with relationships, politics, the quest to know her biological father, among others.
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