Nollywood actress, Adunni Ade has secured another major legal victory, this time against tech giant Google, after a Lagos court awarded her N30 million in damages over stories that falsely linked her romantically to former Kogi State senator, Dino Melaye.

The actress, whose real name is Adunni Adewale, had filed a suit against Google LLC and Meta Platforms Inc. before the Lagos State High Court, accusing the companies of violating her constitutional right to privacy by continuing to host and publish articles that painted her in what she described as a false and misleading light.

Court documents showed that the offending stories included sensational headlines suggesting she had been romantically involved with Melaye, claims she has consistently denied. In her suit, Adunni sought damages along with an order compelling Google to remove the publications from its platforms entirely.

Delivering judgment, the court ruled in Adunni’s favour, ordering Google to delete the two misleading stories from its platforms while awarding her N30 million in damages for the breach of her privacy rights. Meta Platforms, which was also named in the suit, was struck out of the case. The judgment adds to a string of recent legal victories for the actress, who has increasingly turned to the courts rather than social media to defend her reputation against what she considers defamatory reporting.

Reacting to the outcome, Adunni took to her social media page to reflect on the importance of choosing the right battles, stressing that not every dispute needs to be settled with a public back-and-forth online. She noted that some matters are better handled through proper legal channels, a philosophy that has now paid off twice in a matter of months, following an earlier N3 million privacy ruling she also secured against a separate media platform over an unrelated report on her marital life.

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