Mariah Carey is being sued yet again over her holiday hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
According to a complaint filed in a Los Angeles federal court on Wednesday, November 1, and obtained by Us Weekly, the songstress, 54, is facing allegations that the chart-topping 1994 song infringed on the copyright of a 1989 song of the same name.
The man behind the claims, Vince Vance (real name Andy Stone), alleged that Carey’s song shares the same title, lyrics and composition as his track, which was released by his country pop group Vince Vance & the Valiants.
This marks the second time Vance has sued Carey for “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” In the summer of 2022, he filed a similar complaint but ultimately dropped the case in November of that year.
For Vance’s new filing, he teamed up with lawyer Gerard P. Fox, who previously represented two songwriters who sued Taylor Swift for allegedly stealing the lyrics to “Shake It Off.”
“The phrase ‘all I want for Christmas is you’ may seem like a common parlance today, [but] in 1988 it was, in context, distinctive,” the claim said. “Moreover, the combination of the specific chord progression in the melody paired with the verbatim hook was a greater than 50 percent clone of Vance’s original work, in both lyric choice and chord expressions.”
As with the previous complaint, Vance claimed that his original song was given “extensive airplay” in 1993 — one year before Carey released hers — and called it “a country music hit” that reached the Billboard and Hot 100 Airplay charts.
In the new filing, however, Vance also made new claims, alleging that Carey fabricated the story of how she wrote the song. He added that her cowriter, Walter Afanasieff, allegedly “doesn’t believe the story she has spun.”
Additionally, Vance mentioned the success of the 2003 Christmas film Love Actually — which features Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” — and noted that the song is “a featured performance scene in the penultimate act in the mega hit film.”
Carey’s smash holiday song has become a cultural phenomenon and continues to be a fixture of the season nearly 30 years after its release. By 2021, it had sold 10 million units and was certified diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America, making it the first holiday song to achieve that honor. It has also reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 during the past four holiday seasons.
With reporting by Sarah Jones
