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Actress Misses Photo, Takes Tabloid to Court

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Times Staff Writer

Actress Lisa Bonet raised some eyebrows--and more than a little consternation on the part of her TV father, Bill Cosby--when she appeared last year in Rolling Stone magazine wearing nothing but a nose ring.

But celebrity must run in the family. Bonet’s infant daughter, it seems, appeared in the Jan. 10 issue of the National Enquirer. And this time, it was Bonet’s turn to be annoyed.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles federal court, the actress claims a photo of her 3-week-old daughter, Zoe, disappeared when she sent it in for processing at a Reseda drugstore and subsequently surfaced on the pages of the supermarket tabloid.

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Bonet, who also displayed the family anatomy as Mickey Rourke’s co-star in the movie “Angel Heart,” is seeking unspecified damages and a court injunction barring further use of the photo.

Bonet was joined in her lawsuit by her mother, Arlene Boney, who delivered the film to an Osco Drug Store in Reseda on Dec. 22.

When she returned to pick it up six days later, Bonet noticed that the 10th photograph--one of several featuring Zoe--was missing. So was the negative. The photo appeared in the National Enquirer on Jan. 10.

The spread featured Bonet, Zoe and Bonet’s husband, musician Lenny Kravitz, and congratulated the infant for transforming Bonet “from a high-kicking hell-raiser” to a “doting mother.”

The family’s happiness had been “marred,” the magazine added, by a dispute between Bonet and Kravitz over how the child would be raised: Jewish, as Kravitz reportedly preferred, or Buddhist.

The lawsuit--in which Bonet and her mother seek unspecified general damages and $5 million in punitive damages--doesn’t mention the text or photos. But the complaint accuses Osco’s parent company, Anaheim-based America Drug Stores Inc., of “willful, wanton, malicious and oppressive” conduct in its handling of Zoe’s photo.

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The store manager hung up on a reporter, and a corporate spokeswoman said no one was available for comment. Likewise, the National Enquirer’s Los Angeles news bureau refused to comment on the photo.

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