Out singer Frank Ocean has defeated a
$14.5 million libel lawsuit filed by his father.
According
to Pitchfork,
a California federal judge sided with Ocean in the dispute, saying
that Ocean's estranged father, Calvin Cooksey, had not provided
enough evident to support his claim that Ocean had defamed him in a
2016 Tumblr post.
In the post, Ocean recounted that the
last time he saw his father was after he had hurled a slur at a
transgender waitress.
“I was six years old when I heard my
dad call our transgender waitress a fa*got as he dragged me out a
neighborhood diner saying we wouldn’t be served because she was
dirty,” Ocean wrote. “That was the last afternoon I saw my father
and the first time I heard that word, I think, although it wouldn’t
shock me if it wasn’t.”
Ocean wrote the post in the wake of the
Pulse nightclub shooting. Forty-nine people lost their lives and
dozens were wounded when a lone gunman entered the Orlando gay
nightclub and started shooting.
In his lawsuit, filed in February,
Cooksey claimed that Ocean's post put him “in the middle of a
terrorist attack on the gay community” and ruined his career in the
film and music industries.