Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lisa K. Sepe-Wiesenfeld has dismissed a sexual misconduct lawsuit against storied composer Danny Elfman, wherein an anonymous woman claimed he had sexually abused her from 1997 to 2002 — when she was in her twenties and he was twice her age.
As Rolling Stone reports, Elfman's motion for summary judgment was granted by Judge Sepe-Wiesenfeld, who said the Jane Doe plaintiff "shall take nothing from this action." The judge also found that Doe did not qualify for the revival of decades-old claims because the filing "failed" to establish the elements of sexual assault required by the statute cited.
Doe had claimed that Elfman frequently exposed himself to her, and allegedly had admitted to masturbating "every time" she was asleep next to him. Last year, the composer signed a declaration stating that he "never sexually assaulted" the plaintiff. His denial of any wrongdoing under oath and Doe's admission that she was asleep at the time of the alleged assault led the judge to rule that "no liable issue of fact" existed.
"We are disappointed but not shocked that the court found that the law does not permit her case to proceed," the plaintiff's lawyer, Jeff Anderson, said in a statement. "It doesn't change the fact Jane Doe exposed a serious danger: a well-regarded celebrity who used his position and his power for his pernicious pleasure."
Because his client was asleep at the time of the alleged assault, Anderson claimed that "we could not plead the case that met the legal requirements to proceed. It doesn't change the fact that [Elfman] manipulated and used his position over Jane Doe and at least one other survivor."
Anderson's comment is referring to Nomi Abadi, from whom Elfman is still facing separate legal claims. A fellow Los Angeles-based composer, she also sued Elfman in 2023 for failure to pay several instalments of the agreed-upon $830,000 USD settlement for her sexual harassment complaints against him.
Elfman denied Abadi's accusations that he exposed himself and masturbated in front of her on several occasions over the course of a year, after their initial meeting in 2021. "I allowed someone to get close to me without knowing that I was her 'childhood crush' and that her intention was to break up my marriage and replace my wife," he told Rolling Stone last year. "When this person realized that I wanted distance from her, she made it clear that I would pay for having rejected her."
While the matter of the missing payments was sent into arbitration, Abadi proceeded to sue Elfman for defamation in a separate filing.