Judge rejects Zac Brown’s restraining order against ex-wife Kelly Yadzi

Brown requested a temporary restraining order on May 17.

He and Kelly Yazdi dated for 20 months, then married for four more months before the couple jointly announced their divorce last December.

Yazdi made several social media posts describing a damaged relationship without naming names. ” Projection. Gas lighting. Threatening. Stone wall. These are the ingredients of narcissistic abuse,” she wrote in an Instagram post earlier this month.

In her court filing, Brown said Yazdi broke confidentiality agreements she signed as a former employee of his company, Zac Brown Collective. It asked him to stop “making defamatory, false, untrue or otherwise harmful statements regarding (Zac Brown Collective) and its affiliates, Mr. Brown and his family, and the Zac Brown Band and any of its members or members of their family.”

In Yazdi’s response, her lawyers wrote: “Ms. Yazdi’s poetic expressions regarding broken hearts and broken relationships do not present any ’emergency,’ the court must abandon its important work to attend to the emergency, and much less pose a threat – of irreparable harm or otherwise – to Brown’s self-proclaimed “international celebrity status” or to the remarkable and continuing success of the Zac Brown Collective, Inc.”

“This court should not allow itself to be so transparently used to trample on First Amendment rights,” the filing continues. “Nothing in Ms. Yazdi’s employment contracts prevents her from discussing her private life and her marriage to Brown.” The filing says Yazdi did not disclose any “confidential information” regarding her employment with him.

The filing titled “Brown’s requested silence order is particularly hypocritical here, as it comes only after he used his extensive celebrity platform to publicly humiliate and defame Ms. Yazdi by first unilaterally announcing their divorce to a tabloid (TMZ), while putting pressure on Ms. Yazdi. Yazdi is to issue a joint statement calling for “respect for privacy” regarding the divorce.

She also said the Zac Brown Band released a music video featuring video of their November 2023 wedding “in which the image of Ms. Yazdi was intentionally replaced with a model resembling her and depicted someone drinking heavily and take pills.” (They got married in August but had a party with friends and family in November.)

She asked him to take down the video, but he didn’t.

Yadzi’s attorney, R. Jason D’Cruz, who wrote the brief, did not respond to an email Sunday seeking comment on the judge’s decision.

A spokeswoman for Brown chose not to address specific questions related to Yazdi’s record. Instead, she issued a statement: “Ms. Yazdi and her legal team deliberately dropped a lengthy document of allegations made for the press the day before the morning of the hearing. This is a set of lies and fabrications with the calculated aim of misleading and attracting more media attention. We fully intend to dismantle these fairy tales with our testimonies, which will speak for themselves at the next hearing. Brown’s goal remains to restore the privacy he and Ms. Yazdi originally agreed to.

Temporary restraining orders are only used until a more permanent injunction can be put in place and are typically issued in emergency situations to prevent immediate harm, according to Randall Kessler, a divorce attorney in Atlanta not involved in the Brown case but who has handled numerous celebrity divorces. .

But Brown’s efforts to restrict Yazdi’s ability to talk about himself are not easy to achieve, Kessler added.

“One of the problems we always face in situations like this, when our celebrity clients ask for a restraining order, is that there is a high bar to pass for the judge to grant such an order “Kessler said. “And if we don’t win, then the other person feels responsible. It’s difficult, but most of our clients in similar situations hold back to not engage and give the person more oxygen to talk. Courts are often reluctant to restrict speech.