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The National Enquirer and its publisher, American Media Incorporated, will make a formal apology and be required to fund a playwriting organization after falsely claiming that playwright David Bar Katz was the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s gay lover in a story first debunked by Gossip Cop.
On Tuesday, news of the agreement was reported by The New York Times, where the Enquirer will take out a full-page advertisement on Wednesday, apologizing for its disgraceful and wholly untrue story.
As part of the deal, the supermarket tabloid will fund Katz’s new American Playwriting Foundation, which will hand out an annual $45,000 prize for an unproduced play.
The Enquirer claims that it published the allegations about Katz and Hoffman — just three days after Hoffman’s death — after being duped by an individual claiming to be Katz, who told the gullible outlet that he and Hoffman were in a drug-laced homosexual relationship.
In fact, the two men were close but platonic friends, and Katz was one of the two people who discovered Hoffman’s body in the actor’s New York apartment earlier this month.
Gossip Cop was the first outlet to report that Katz had never spoken with the Enquirer, and that the Enquirer story was 100 percent bogus.
Katz filed a libel suit against the tabloid within hours of discovering the false story.
On Tuesday, he formally filed to have the lawsuit dismissed after reaching the deal with the Enquirer.
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