Mariah Carey Says ‘All I Want For Christmas’ Lawsuit Accuser Must Repay Six-Figure Legal Bill

The singer and other defendants hired elite attorneys to fend off "frivolous" allegations about her smash hit Christmas track.

Apr 3, 2025 - 18:35

Mariah Carey Says ‘All I Want For Christmas’ Lawsuit Accuser Must Repay Six-Figure Legal Bill

After beating a copyright lawsuit over her holiday classic “All I Want for Christmas is You,” Mariah Carey and other defendants say the little-known songwriter who filed the case must now repay more than $180,000 they spent on lawyers defending his “frivolous” arguments.

When a federal judge dismissed Vince Vance’s lawsuit last month – ruling the two songs mostly just shared “Christmas song clichés” – she sharply criticized the songwriter and his lawyers for “egregious” conduct during the case and ordered him to repay some of Carey’s legal bill.

On Wednesday, that bill came due: Carey and the other defendants in the case told the judge they spent a combined $185,602.30 paying a team of high-priced lawyers to work a total of 295 hours to defeat the “frivolous” motions advanced by Vance’s attorneys.

If that sounds like a lot, Carey’s lawyers say its because Vance was making radical demands.

“The court should consider that [Vance was] seeking, among other things, $20 million in damages, injunctive relief, and even the destruction of all copies of ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You,’” her attorneys say. “Considering such drastic requested relief, and the results obtained, defendants were perfectly justified in incurring the aforementioned attorney’s fees to successfully oppose plaintiffs’ motion.”

Vance (real name Andy Stone) first sued Carey in 2022, claiming “All I Want” infringed the copyrights to a 1989 song of the exact same name recorded by his Vince Vance and the Valiants. He claimed the earlier track received “extensive airplay” during the 1993 holiday season — a year before Carey released her now-better-known hit.

“Carey has … palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own,” Vance wrote in his latest complaint. “Her hubris knowing no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn’t believe the story she has spun.”

Vance’s allegations were a big deal because Carey’s song is big business. The 1994 blockbuster, which became even more popular after it was featured in the 2003 holiday rom-com Love Actually, has re-taken the top spot on the Hot 100 for six straight years and earned a whopping $8.5 million in global revenue in 2022.

But in a ruling last month, Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani said Vance had failed to show that the songs were similar enough to violate copyright law. She cited analysis by a musicologist who said the two tracks were “very different songs” that shared only “commonplace Christmas song clichés” that had been used in many earlier tracks.

“Plaintiffs have not met their burden of showing that [the songs by] Carey and Vance are substantially similar under the extrinsic test,” Ramírez Almadani wrote at the time, using the legal term for how courts assess such allegations.

The judge not only tossed out Vance’s case, but also ruled that he and his lawyers should be punished for advancing meritless arguments that the judge said were aimed to “cause unnecessary delay and needlessly increase the costs of litigation.”

In Wednesday’s filing, the defendants told the judge how much Vance should pay under that order – saying they had been charged reasonable or even below-market rates from elite music litigators at top law firms.

Carey, repped by Peter Anderson and others from the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, asked for about $141,000; Walter Afanasieff, a co-writer on Carey’s track repped by Kenneth D. Freundlich, asked for $7,000; Sony Music, represented by Benjamin Akley, Donald Zakarin, Ilene Farkas and others from Pryor Cashman, asked for $32,000; and Kobalt, repped by Bert Deixler and others from Kendall Brill & Kelly LLP, asked for $5,000.

The judge will rule on the request at some point in the weeks or months ahead. Vance’s attorneys will be allowed to file a response disputing the calculation; they can also appeal the ruling dismissing their case, though such a challenge will likely face long odds.