David Bar Katz, a friend of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s who was the one who found Hoffman dead on Sunday, has vowed to sue the tabloid National Enquirer because he says they made up an interview with him.
Despite a full article about comments Katz allegedly made in an interview, Katz insisted that he never spoke with the magazine.
“There was no interview,” Katz’s lawyer Judd Burstein said in the lawsuit, reported the NY Daily News.
Part of the report claimed that Katz saw Hoffman freebasing cocaine the night before Hoffman died.
The lawyer said in the suit that Katz did not see that, and also never saw Hoffman use heroin or cocaine.
Hoffman died from suspected heroin overdose.
“This article is just disgusting,” Burstein told the News.
“Here you have Phil’s family and his friends grieving, and the Enquirer comes along seeking to make a buck through putrid lies,” Burstein said. “Worse still, it appears that the Enquirer sent out a press release hyping the story so that it could sell more copies of the magazine. I do not know how these people can sleep at night.”
The lawsuit seeks $5 million damages and another $45 million in punitive damages.
A man who told the News that he is the editor in chief at the Enquirer and said that “As far as I know, the interview was done on Sunday by a staff reporter.”
However, pressed to confirm that he was Tony Frost, the editor in chief at the tabloid, the man said “I'll get right back to you,” and hung up.
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