Catfight in Brentwood

Reuters is reporting that actor Jim Belushi has filed a $1 million lawsuit against his neighbor, actress Julie Newmar.

Belushi claims that Newmar, best known as Catwoman in the "Batman" show in the 1960s, has waged a campaign of harassment to try to force him to move. He accuses Newmar of spying on him and his family, ruining a fence and landscaping on his property, and making “defamatory statements” about him.

In May, the National Enquirer ran a story in which Newmar accused Belushi of threatening to have her “wiped out” because she complained about the noise of his pool pump and Belushi’s spokesman accused her of egging Belushi’s house. Newmar also claimed that Belushi painted the curb in front of his house red; when she called the City to have it repainted gray, she alleged that he "drove by my house on his motor scooter, stopped his scooter, raised his fist and yelled at me, 'This is war!'"

This is not the first time Newmar has been embroiled in a dispute in her community. In 1997, she was so upset that a neighbor refused to make his gardener to stop using a leafblower that she spray-painted the word “noise” in Spanish in the alley outside his home. (She also sent a letter to the mayor theatening to move to New Zealand, where, presumably, hobbits quietly clean up the leaves from driveways and sidewalks.)