Lindsay Lohan Sues E*Trade for $100M

(Updated with closing share price).

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Shares of E*Trade Financial (ETFC) were unfazed by the company's brush with celebrity on Tuesday following a New York Post report that actress Lindsay Lohan is suing the online brokerage.

The stock closed up a cent to $1.68 with volume of 23.6 million, well below its three-month daily average, indicating investors don't see much of a threat from the star of "Mean Girls" and other movies.

The Post said Lohan is seeking $100 million for pain and suffering. She is alleging one of the talking babies featured in a recent E*Trade commercial was named after her. The commercial in question aired for the first time during the Super Bowl.

In the advertisement, which you can see here:

a so-called "milkaholic" boyfriend-stealing baby is named Lindsay. The ad is just the latest in an ongoing series of E*Trade commercials deploying talking babies to promote the broker's services.

The Post article states that Lohan's lawyer is positing that the 23-year-old actress is recognizable by only her first name much like Oprah and Madonna and says that E*Trade has "garnered great profits" from the millions who watched the commercial. That would be welcome news for shareholders as the company reported a loss of $525 million for fiscal 2009 on Jan. 27and Wall Street doesn't expect it to get back in the black until the fourth quarter of this year.

"They used the name Lindsay," Stephanie Ovadia, Lohan's lawyer told the Post. "They're using her name as a parody of her life. Why didn't they use the name Susan? This is a subliminal message. Everybody's talking about it and saying it's Lindsay Lohan."

A representative for the group that produced the commercial denied to the Post that the character was based on Lohan.

Lohan apparently filed the suit in New York's Nassau County Supreme Court seeking $50 million in exemplary damages and another $50 million in compensatory damages, the Post says. Lohan's rep is seeking an injunction to remove the commercial from the air and to secure all existing copies of it.

An E*Trade spokeswoman said the company had not seen the complaint yet and declined to comment further.

-- Written by Laurie Kulikowski in New York

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