Nineties pop superstar Sinéad O’Connor hasn’t released a record since 2014, but her name is appearing next to Prince’s … and Eddie Murphy’s and Arsenio Hall’s. Oh yeah, and Hall is suing her.
On Monday, O’Connor took to Facebook, seemingly unprompted, and accused Hall — who she inexplicably called “Prince’s and Eddie Murphy’s b—” — of supplying Prince with drugs along with drugging her in the past at Murphy’s house.
She claims she called the Carver County Sheriff’s office to report Hall. She also suggested that Hall clean his “man cave” in anticipation of the police’s supposed arrival.
Hall filed a defamation lawsuit against O’Connor seeking $5 million in damages on Thursday in the L.A. Superior Court, stating that the 49-year-old singer “maliciously published outlandish defamatory lies,” ABC News reported. “The malicious statements made by O’Connor are absolutely false, and O’Connor’s heinous accusations that Hall engaged in this criminal conduct are despicable, fabricated lies,” the suit statess.
“The truth is that Hall never supplied illegal drugs to Prince, and he never ‘spiked’ O’Connor with drugs.”
In the post, O’Connor also accused Prince, a devout Jehovah’s Witness, of being a long-time drug user. ” Anyone imagining prince (sic) was not a long time hard drug user is living in cloud cuckoo land,” she wrote of the artist who originally wrote and recorded her breakout hit “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
This all seems to be a response to the unsettling tangle of details (and, of course, rumors) that have emerged since Prince’s death. The music icon, who was known not only for neither drinking nor consuming drugs but from forbidding others around him to, was allegedly addicted to prescription painkillers. So addicted, in fact, that he had reached out to addiction specialist Dr. Howard Kornfeld, who sent his son Andrew Kornfeld to Minneapolis on an overnight flight, the New York Times reported. Andrew was one of the people who found Prince’s body the next morning.
Many close to him had no idea he even used prescription painkillers — reportedly his usage increased following necessary hip surgery in the 2000s, fixing damage caused by years of his extremely physical performances — but to some it makes sense, even given Price’s essentially teetotaling nature. If he was doing it in service of his craft, that is.
O’Connor has made unfounded accusations concerning Prince in the past, claiming that he had attacked her after she released the cover of his song.
In an interview with NRK, a Norwegian radio and television station, O’Connor said Prince requested she not curse in her interviews since that was against his values. When she refused, she claims he chased her around the Hollywood Hills, hitting her.
She went on to claim Prince chased her around the car, attempting to punch her, and she had to ring a neighbor’s doorbell “to escape.”
In a later interview, she said she’d rather leave her relationship with Prince in the past.
O’Connor’s certainly no stranger to making statements she later recants in some way. She claimed to be gay in an interview with lesbian-focused Curve magazine in 2000, only to couch that claim, stating it wasn’t really true in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. And, seven years after telling Oprah that she suffered from bi-polar disorder, she announced on her website that she has no such mental illness.
Nor is she a stranger to controversy. The Irish singer, who was allegedly ordained as a priest in the Catholic Latine Tridentine Church — a splinter faction from the Catholic Church — famously tore a picture of Pope John Paul II into two pieces on live television during a performance on “Saturday Night Live,” causing NBC to be flooded with angry phone calls.
Last November, she wrote what appeared to be a suicide note on her Facebook page. Though the note has since been deleted, according to CBS News, it read “The last two nights finished me off. I have taken an overdose. There is no other way to get respect. I am not at home, I’m at a hotel, somewhere in ireland, under another name. … I’m scum and deserve to be abandoned … just when I’ve had my womb and ovaries chopped out and my child is frighteningly sick … I’m invisible. I don’t matter a shred to anyone. No one has come near me … I’ve died a million times already with the pain of it … My children don’t care if I live r die anyway. Neither do their dads. Everyone is better off. Never ever do this to a woman again. Let this be your lesson …”
She reportedly then received medical attention.
Thus far, O’Connor has not responded to Hall’s lawsuit.