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Nearly a month after his shocking death following a fall from a third-story hotel balcony, Liam Payne‘s body has been released to his family in order to repatriate his remains to the singer’s native U.K. for burial.
According to Reuters, an unnamed senior cemetery source in Buenos Aires told the news service that Payne’s body was taken from the city’s British cemetery on Wednesday (Nov. 6) in the first leg of its repatriation journey. The 31-year-old singer’s body had been held by local authorities since Payne’s Oct. 16 death in order to complete toxicology and other lab tests.
BBC News also reported that Payne’s body had been released to his family according to a public prosecutor in charge of his case.
Two weeks ago, the luxury Argentinian hotel where Payne died was raided by police, who reportedly took away a number of items, including hard drives and CCTV footage. An autopsy report revealed that Payne died from a number of injuries, including internal and external bleeding caused by the fall. In addition, investigators reportedly found a number of illicit substances in his body at the time of death, including a recreational drug called “pink cocaine,” a mixture of substances that often contains ketamine combined with MDMA, methamphetamine, cocaine, opioids and/or psychoactive substances.
The first planned posthumous single from Payne, “Do No Wrong,” was slated to drop on Nov. 1 before Grammy-winning producer Sam Pounds announced that he’d decided to hold off on releasing the song until the late singer’s family felt comfortable with issuing it. “I want all proceeds go to a charity of their choosing (or however they desire),” Pounds wrote on his socials on Oct. 29. “Even though we all love the song it’s not the time yet. We are all still mourning the passing of Liam and I want the family to morn [sic] in peace and in prayer. We will all wait.” No updated release date has been announced.
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More than two years since Mariah Carey was hit with legal action for allegedly stealing her perennial holiday hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You”, a California federal judge has said she feels “inclined” to grant Carey’s request for the motion to be dismissed.
As Rolling Stone reports, Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani said at a Thursday court hearing that she was leaning toward dismissing the case, in which Vince Vance (real name Andy Stone) claims Carey’s seasonal blockbuster infringes upon his 1989 song of the same name.
The legal saga dates back to the summer of 2022, when Vance first filed his copyright lawsuit. After dropping his initial case, he refiled the lawsuit last year with the same basic accusations, claiming the super star had “palmed off” his song as her own with an “incredulous origin story.”
“Her hubris knowing no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn’t believe the story she has spun,” Vance’s lawyers wrote at the time. “This is simply a case of actionable infringement.”
The new lawsuit went into further details about the similarities than the original case, noting “unique linguistic structure” and specific musical elements, and claiming it’s a “greater than 50% clone of Vance’s original work”.
This past August, Carey’s legal team requested the lawsuit be dropped, noting that Vance’s claims fail the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal’s “extrinsic test for substantial similarity in protectable expression” — essentially arguing that any similarities between the two songs are coincidental.
At Thursday’s hearing, Judge Almadani said she was “inclined” to grant that request, according to the Rolling Stone report. The judge also said she was “seriously considering” granting a related motion filed by Carey’s team requesting sanctions against the plaintiffs for what is alleged to be a “frivolous” filing.
In his argument, Gerald P. Fox, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, noted it is “not required” they show the song is “identical” or “virtual plagiarism”, but rather that only “a certain arrangement of notes has to be unique, or the melody, or any aspect of the composition that’s copied or similar”.
Carey’s lawyer, Peter Anderson, argued that the similarities that have been identified by musicologists hired by the plaintiffs amount to phrases such as “Santa Claus” and “mistletoe” – lyrics which Carey’s team have claimed are public domain.
“These are random similarities. Five or so Christmas tropes that make these Christmas songs,” Anderson claimed. “Importantly, there are eight or nine other Christmas tropes in their work that don’t appear in ours. And eight or nine in ours that don’t appear in theirs.”
Judge Almadani has not yet issued a ruling on the case, and has not indicated when a ruling is expected.
First released in October 1994 as the first single from Carey’s Merry Christmas album, “All I Want for Christmas is You” is one of the most popular holiday songs in history. For the past four years, it has re-charted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 during the holiday season.
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