Madonna has obtained an injunction to stop the sale of her old hairbrush at an auction after telling a judge that the buyer could extract her DNA from locks still caught on the bristles.
The hairbrush was the prize lot among a trove of jewellery, clothes and signed memorabilia that were to be offered for sale yesterday by an auction house in New York. A piece of underwear was also listed as well as a letter from her former boyfriend, Tupac Shakur, the rapper who died in 1996.
The items were removed from the inventory of the Gotta Have It! Collectibles sale yesterday, though a spokesman for the auctioneer insisted that the sale had been delayed only temporarily and that the items were the legal property of Darlene Lutz, a former friend of the pop star.
Ms Lutz once worked as Madonna’s personal art curator, overseeing her collection of 20th-century masters and contemporary artists. Madonna’s “eye is fantastically developed”, Ms Lutz told The Times in 2001. But the two apparently fell out. Court documents from 2005 show they were adversaries in a legal proceeding in which Madonna demanded repayment of $265,000. It was not clear how the case was settled.
Madonna, 58, said that she was shocked to learn of the auction because she had no idea that the items were no longer in her possession.
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“The fact that I have attained celebrity status as a result of success in my career does not obviate my right to maintain my privacy, including with regard to highly personal items,” she said as she sought an emergency court order in New York.
“I understand that my DNA could be extracted from a piece of my hair. It is outrageous and grossly offensive that my DNA could be auctioned for sale to the general public.”
Lawrence Brody, a geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute, said that the pop star was probably right to think that the hairbrush might offer a buyer her DNA. It could provide an insight into her ancestry, he said, or whether she had a disposition to type 2 diabetes.
The buyer might also be able to tell if she was particularly at risk of developing certain diseases.
But what of the larger question. What would happen if the hairbrush was obtained by someone who wanted to create their own Madonna, or quite possibly, a thousand of them?
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At the Church Lab at Harvard University, where efforts are afoot to create a clone of a woolly mammoth, George Church said that it might be problematic to clone the singer from her hairbrush because the cells would have died by now.
“Hair root cells enable reading a genome with current technologies,” he said. But “drying usually makes the cell unsuitable for cloning [today]”.
He added that anyone in close proximity to Madonna could get access to her DNA — if they were so inclined.
“A brush is not the only source of DNA,” Professor Church said. “Every time we touch a chair, table, glass, shake hands, even walking through air releases many skin cells which are just as informative as the hair in brushes.”
Reserved items
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•Sir Daniel Day-Lewis, the actor, successfully saved autographs and his scrapbook from going on sale in 2015.
• Jackie Kennedy’s love letters to her first husband, John F Kennedy, were withdrawn from auction in Co Laois. They were to be sold for an estimated $5 million in 2014.
• The sale of a vial containing Ronald Reagan’s dried blood was blocked in 2012 when his family complained.
•The headboard of Michael Jackson’s death bed was withdrawn from auction at his family’s request. Julien’s Auctions in Los Angeles was planning to sell it in December 2011 for between $3,000 and $5,000.