Lady Gaga wants to be repaid nearly $250,000 in legal bills she spent defeating a lawsuit that claimed her Mayhem album infringed a brand of Mayhem surfboards — calling the case a “publicity stunt” aimed at “extracting” money from her.
Lost Surfboards sued the star (Stefani Germanotta) last year, claiming people who saw her album name would think it was somehow endorsed by the surf company. But the case was rejected last month by a federal judge, who said no such consumer confusion was likely.
In a scathing motion Friday, Gaga’s attorneys say the star should not be forced to pay the huge legal bills ($232,484 in) she racked up beating that case. They say it was “never a legitimate lawsuit” but instead an improper effort to “capitalize on the fame and popularity of Lady Gaga” by suing her over the use of “a common dictionary word.”
“A litigant should not be permitted to use the federal courts to launch a publicity stunt masquerading as a lawsuit against a high-profile artist,” Gaga’s attorney Orin Snyder writes in the filing, obtained and first reported by Billboard. “Nor should it be permitted to wield the machinery of litigation as a device for extracting a settlement that the merits cannot justify. This lawsuit was both.”
Lost suffered a major early defeat, when the judge ruled it was unlikely to win the case and rejected an injunction that would have forced Gaga to immediately stop using the name on her album and tour. But rather than back down, Gaga’s lawyers say, Lost then “doubled down” and “dug in,” forcing another nine months of expensive litigation — including repeated demands that the star herself sit for a day-long deposition.
“A full-day deposition of a world-famous artist at the height of a grueling international tour, in service of claims already held barred, had one function: to make continued litigation so disruptive that settlement became cheaper than vindication,” Snyder writes. “The burden was the point. That is not the vindication of trademark rights; it is the use of federal process as a pressure campaign.”
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Lost’s lawsuit, filed in March 2025, claimed that Gaga’s album name a “blatant disregard” of the company’s trademark rights to its Mayhem brand, which it has sold since the 1980s. It argued the name was not only confusing, but that it appeared on the album and merch in a stylized red logo that was highly similar to the one on the surfboards.
But for decades, U.S. courts have made it very difficult to sue over the use of trademarks in “expressive” works like books, movies and songs, ruling that the First Amendment right to free speech generally trumps the rights of a brand owner to police how their name is used.
That basic premise led to a ruling in December, in which Judge Fernando M. Olguin refused to issue Lost the injunction, and then a final ruling last month, in which he said Lost’s lawsuit was clearly barred by those First Amendment precedents.
“These allegations are conclusory and insufficient to constitute an explicit indication, overt claim, or explicit misstatement identifying Lost as the source of Lady Gaga’s work,” the judge wrote at the time, adding that simply using the same word was “not enough.”
At the time, Lost’s attorney Keith G. Bremer said he and his client “respectfully disagree” with the decision and vowed to appeal it. They have not yet filed a notice of appeal, and Bremer did not return a request for comment on Monday (Sept. 14).
In Friday’s filing, Gaga’s attorneys call Lost’s lawsuit “exceptional” — the formal threshold under federal trademark laws for when a victorious party can recoup legal bills from an opponent. While the star’s lawyers argue that the case got more and more problematic as Lost refused to concede defeat, they say the case against Gaga had nonetheless been “exceptional the day it was filed.”
“Lost asked this Court to believe that consumers would mistake stadium-tour merchandise — including merchandise emblazoned with Lady Gaga’s name and image — for the products of a San Clemente surf shop,” the star’s attorneys write.
