Inside Lindsay Lohan's Four-Year Legal Fight Over a GTA Character

In July 2014, actor Lindsay Lohan filed a lawsuit against video game studio Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, in New York Supreme Court. She said a character in GTA V was built around her image without her permission.

The Character Lohan Says Copied Her

The character at the heart of the case is Lacey Jonas, a minor figure who appears in a short side event in GTA V. Players run into her in an alley in the game’s fictional “Vinewood” district, where she is hiding from photographers.

She asks for a ride home, and during the drive, she complains about the pressures that come with being famous. The resemblance to Lohan stood out most on the game’s cover art, where a similar-looking woman is shown holding a cell phone.

Lohan filed her case under New York’s privacy statute, a law that lets people sue over the unapproved use of their name, image, or voice for commercial gain. She sought unspecified damages from Take-Two.

According to court filings summarized by legal analysts at Lexology, Lohan argued that the character copied her “bikini, shoulder-length blonde hair, jewelry, cell phone, and signature peace sign pose.”

Her complaint also pointed to in-game references to her breakout role in Mean Girls and to the Chateau Marmont, the West Hollywood hotel where she once lived, as further proof that Rockstar had drawn from her real life without asking.

Lohan’s Career Before the Lawsuit

Long before this case, Lohan had already built a career most young actors only dream about. She got her start as a child star in the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap, then became a teen icon through Freaky Friday and Mean Girls.

Family-friendly hits like Herbie Fully Loaded followed, alongside more serious work such as Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion.

By the early 2010s, her career had shifted toward smaller, independent projects, including a lead role in the 2013 film The Canyons. She also dealt with a series of highly publicized personal setbacks during this stretch, which made a steady comeback difficult.

Still, she kept working. In fact, around the same time she filed her suit against Rockstar, Lohan was preparing for her stage debut in London. She went on to star in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow at the Playhouse Theatre, which opened on September 24, 2014, just weeks after her lawsuit made headlines.

A Surprising Win, Then a Reversal

The case took its first real turn in March 2016, when a trial judge denied Take-Two’s request to dismiss it outright. That decision surprised legal observers, since New York’s privacy law is written narrowly and rarely favors plaintiffs in cases like this.

The same judge also let a related lawsuit move forward from Karen Gravano, a star of the reality show Mob Wives, who had filed a separate $40 million complaint claiming a character named “Andrea Bottino” was based on her, right down to shared phrases and a father who had worked as a government informant.

That early momentum didn’t last. On September 1, 2016, a five-judge panel on New York’s Appellate Division reversed the trial court and dismissed both lawsuits.

The panel found that even if Rockstar had drawn inspiration from real people, the finished product counted as a work of fiction and satire, thanks to its original story, dialogue, and settings, plus the freedom players have to choose how they play.

The judges also ruled more directly that Take-Two did not use plaintiffs’ name, portrait, or picture, which is the specific standard New York law requires for a privacy claim to succeed.

The State’s Top Court Settles It

Lohan didn’t give up. Her legal team pushed the case up to the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. By this stage, the dispute had drawn attention well beyond the two sides involved.

Groups including the Motion Picture Association of America, the Entertainment Software Association, and the American Booksellers Association filed briefs supporting Take-Two’s position, arguing that a win for Lohan could limit creative freedom across books, films, and games.

On March 29, 2018, the court ruled unanimously against her, 6-0. Judge Eugene Fahey, writing for the panel, described Lacey Jonas as a satirical portrayal of “a modern, beach-going young woman,” not a recognizable stand-in for Lohan herself.

The court went further, calling the depiction “nothing more than cultural comment,” and separate reporting on the decision described the panel’s view of the character as a twenty-something woman without any particular identifying physical characteristics.

Notably, the written opinion did leave room for future cases, confirming that a computer-generated image can count as a “portrait” under New York law in principle. Lohan’s version of that claim simply didn’t hold up, because the character wasn’t identifiable as her. Gravano’s case was dismissed that same day in a separate order.

Neither side had much to add publicly once the ruling came down. A spokesperson for Lohan declined to comment, her attorney could not be reached right away, and Take-Two did not respond to requests for comment from reporters covering the decision.

What the Case Means Beyond the Courtroom

The lawsuit fits into a much larger legal pattern. Many U.S. states, including New York, recognize some version of a “right of publicity,” which gives people control over how their name or image gets used for profit.

Courts have consistently drawn a line, though: using someone’s likeness in an advertisement usually needs their permission, while using it in news coverage, documentaries, or fiction is generally protected by the First Amendment.

That distinction, explained in detail by legal analysis from the Washington Post, is exactly why Lohan’s case struggled from the start.

There’s also a twist that undercuts the whole premise of the lawsuit. The woman pictured on the game’s loading screen, long rumored online to be modeled on either Lohan or another celebrity, was actually a working model named Shelby Welinder.

According to later reporting, Welinder was hired through a modeling agency in 2012 specifically to shoot reference photos for the artwork, and she has since shared proof of that job. She went on to build a career of her own as a freelance journalist.