Stephenie Meyer Vindicated: Lawsuit Dismissed!

By Twilight_News | 3 December 2009

A few months back we covered the story of Jordan Scott (aspiring singer,songwriter, screen writer, model, novelist, actress) who claimed that Stephenie Meyer plagiarized Breaking Dawn from Jordan Scott’s novel The Nocturne. We posted a case by case analysis as to how (aside from the obvious fact that the texts bore little resemblance to each other) that this was impossible based on copyright dates and other factors.

This was the second story regarding plagiarism in 2009. The first story about Stephenie plagiarizing a college roommate’s story was an Internet hoax completely without merit.

Well it looks like a judge agrees as to what we thought all along about Jordan Scott’s claim. Hachette Books, the parent company of Little Brown that publishes the Twilight Saga novels, released this statement:

“The Honorable Otis D. Wright II of the United States District Court has ruled in favor of Stephenie Meyer and Hachette Book Group and has dismissed with prejudice Jordan Scott’s claim of copyright infringement.

In his ruling, Judge Wright stated that the two works have little in common and that the “characters in the two works are vastly different.” The decision admonishes Scott for “the deceptive presentation of the alleged similarities” and notes that she “has twice manipulated aspects of the subject works in order to create the appearance of similarity.”

While an attempt to ride on someone else’s success may not be surprising, it is encouraging that the courts and the public are not so easily misled.

This judgment confirms what we have known all along – Breaking Dawn is a wholly original work by Stephenie Meyer and this was a frivolous lawsuit brought for the purposes of publicizing the plaintiff’s personal publishing aspirations. Hachette Book Group and Stephenie Meyer are pleased to be able to put this case behind us.”