Kelly Rutherford’s bizarre child custody battle has spilled over another international border.
The ex-husband of the “Gossip Girl” actress is going after Vanity Fair magazine with a legal action filed in Germany last week.
A German businessman now living with the couple’s two kids in Monaco and France, Daniel Giersch claims Vanity Fair’s recent expose on his bruising family law case included “untrue and defamatory assertions” that harmed his reputation.
He asked for an immediate restraining order that was granted last week by a civil judge in Hamburg, a press release from his law firm stated.
The ruling, once served, means Vanity Fair could face disciplinary fines up to $275,000 if it continues to assert several disputed statements in the article inside Germany.
The piece was first published online Oct. 31 under the title, “Inside Kelly Rutherford’s Brutal, Globe-Spanning Custody Battle.”
It later appeared in the November print edition with the headline, “Irreconcilable Distances.”
Giersch says it’s false that Rutherford initiated divorce proceedings when she was three months pregnant with their daughter Helena in 2008.
He is listed as the petitioner on the paperwork filed in December 2008 in Los Angeles.
Giersch also claims Rutherford did try for full custody at first, despite one of her quotes in the Vanity Fair article, and he disputes the assertions that he only wanted son Hermes to have a German passport and that he visited Helena in the hospital the day after she was born.
A lawyer for Giersch said the legal filing in Germany is part of a stepped-up effort to rehab the foreign father’s image and protect the couple’s children, now 9 and 6 years old.
“Our client, Daniel Giersch, has had to repeatedly endure in recent years numerous assertions that were untrue and completely fabricated. This needs to come to an end, now,” Dr. Oliver Scherenberg of the Hamburg law firm Preu Bohlig said.
“Our client has suffered significant injury to his reputation due to these untrue and defamatory assertions, against which he is now defending himself. The actions taken against the false assertions published in Vanity Fair are only the beginning,” Scherenberg warned.
“The children of our client must have an opportunity to grow up in peace and to be shielded from the glare of the public eye. This means that they should not have to read falsehoods in the press about their father. It also means that they should be kept out of the media spotlight as much as possible,” he said.
Scherenberg said his team has launched an “extensive and successful campaign” in Europe to prevent images of the children from appearing in the press.
Attempts to reach a spokesperson for Vanity Fair were not immediately successful Monday.
Rutherford’s battle with Giersch has been widely reported as a nightmare involving two U.S.-born kids sent to live with their dad in a foreign country by a California judge who initially said the situation would be temporary.
That judge eventually moved on from the case, and when Rutherford asked the court to step in again earlier this year, a new judge said California no longer had jurisdiction because the kids were living in Monaco and Rutherford was living in New York.
Rutherford argued that she only lived in New York to be closer to the kids for frequent visits, but it didn’t persuade the court.
Once the new California judge gave up control with a ruling over the summer, the desperate mom tried but failed to get a New York judge to intervene.
With no state court willing to hear her claims that Giersch was acting unfairly, Rutherford took a gamble last August and refused to send the kids back to Monaco as planned after a five week summer vacation in Manhattan.
The move backfired, and a Monaco judge reportedly handed full custody to Giersch earlier this month, giving Rutherford only limited visitation in Monaco and France.
Rutherford, 47, was photographed in Italy last week and posted a photo on Christmas day with the hashtag #Switzerland.
It’s not clear what type of visitation she received for the holidays.
“You should know that love changes everything,” read a quote from poet Cleo Wade that she posted on Instagram Dec. 26 with the caption, “Yes it does.”
