Lee Daniels and his “Empire” cohorts have at least two reasons to smile today. Not only did the Fox hip-hop soap opera return to huge ratings on Wednesday night, but a judge has ruled in their favor in a lawsuit claiming that they had ripped off the idea for the series.
A judge has tossed out a lawsuit filed by Jon Astor-White, who claimed that “Empire” infringes on a treatment he had written for a project called “King Solomon,” about a character “who was educated at Harvard, started a small record label with one female singer and turned that into a billion-dollar business with numerous subsidiaries.”
The Hollywood-set project was intended to provide “an inside look into the billion dollar record business, through the eyes of a wealthy black family,” according to court papers obtained by TheWrap.
In federal court in California, Judge Percy Anderson shot down the lawsuit, granting the defendants’ motion to dismiss.
Anderson determined that Astor-White alleged no facts supporting the possibility that the defendants — which also included “Empire” co-creator Danny Strong, Imagine Television and 20th Century Fox Film Corp. — had access to his treatment.
He also found that there aren’t enough similarities between “King Solomon” and “Empire” to make a case.
“Plaintiff’s skeletal treatment provides very little detail concerning either a sequence of events or theme, but to the extent the treatment contains a sequence of events, it has almost nothing in common with the way the story of ‘Empire’ develops,” Anderson found.
Pamela Chelin contributed to this report.