Cheer up, Junie! Remember the sage words of the great Satchel Paige: “How old would you be, if you didn’t know how old you was?”

In October of 2011, Ethics Alarms offered an Ethics Quiz that asked, “Did the Internet Movie Data Base do anything unethical by publishing the actress’s real age without her permission?” The occasion was a lawsuit asking for over a million dollars in damages by an anonymous film actress who claimed that Amazon’s Internet Movie Data Base harmed her career by researching and publishing her real age without her permission. My conclusion at the time was that Actress X was

“shooting at the wrong villain. If there is age discrimination in Hollywood, confront it: a number shouldn’t disqualify her from any roles at all. I am not saying that fighting such a long-standing tradition in the show business culture isn’t a daunting task, but that’s the real problem, not a web service that conveys information about movies and movie stars by publishing facts.”

Well, it’s almost four years later, this dubious case has wound its way to trial, and we are now learning some fascinating things:

• The name of the actress is Junie Hoang. Her website is here. She includes photos like this on it, and yet thinks her career is foundering because people know how old she is. Wowsers.

• She sent the IMDB a fake age.

• She was making about $2000 a year before her real age was published, and not any less after the world could find out how old she really was.

• A brief perusal of her IMDB page shows that her typical credits include roles in “Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust,”  “Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver,” “The Adventures of Zion Man & The Supreme Commander,” “Hoodrats 2: Hoodrat Warriors” (in which ageless Junie played the complex role of “Ghetto Girl Three,”  “Z: A Zombie Musical,’ in which she was the “Zombie Postwoman,” and more recently the TV Series “Exotic Dancers of Houston”  and the film classic, “Lap Dance.”

• Hoang’s agent, Joe Kolkowitz, who was called to testify by her lawyer, wouldn’t say under oath that Hoang’s earning power had decreased after IMDb’s publication of her real age.

• Hoang violated the IMBD user’s agreement (From Techdirt):

The most grueling part of the cross examination came when [ Amazon attorney] Schneider walked Hoang through the IMDb user agreement and its provisions where users promise to submit accurate information.The attorney pointed Hoang’s attention to various ways she had made some artifice — submitting an incorrect birthdate initially (she entered in text indicating that she had a supporting birth certificate), entering information through accounts other than her own (despite prohibitions in the user agreement against sharing passwords and accounts), attempting to convince IMDb’s customer service that someone else submitted the original date of birth information, and finally, sending over a fake passport image and a fake ID.In the end, Hoang threw up her arms and admitted she did indeed submit inaccurate information…

I think we have the complete picture now. This is frivolous law suit, an effort to squeeze a settlement out of a big company by means of a dishonest claim. One unethical aspect of it is that it should have been dismissed by a competent judge: an unsuccessful actress whose acting income places her supposed profession in the realm of a hobby claims that she deserves to be awarded a million dollars because an online directory published her real age after she violated the user’s agreement by repeatedly submitting it a false one. Come on. IMBD is being sued because it wouldn’t aid and abet Hoang’s efforts to lie to potential employers. How does such a suit get to trial?

The ethics rules governing lawyers require them to have a good faith belief that a law suit could prevail, so I suppose this passes, barely, the lower than low bar that the profession has erected for sanctionable frivolity, but heavens to Betsy, how desperate must a lawyer be to accept such a case?

As for Hoang, I’d say her new avocation of trying to hit the jackpot with contrived lawsuits is even less promising than her previous one.

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Pointer: Instapundit

Facts: Tech Dirt