`Foxy Lady' is winner over Hendrix slur

NICOLE VEASH

The girlfriend who inspired guitarist Jimi Hendrix's song "Foxy Lady" claimed victory yesterday over her Sixties rival who was found guilty of contempt by a High Court judge.

Kathy Etchingham, now a 49-year old doctor's wife and mother of two sons, said she hoped her battle with German-born Monika Danneman, was over.

Miss Danneman, 48, in whose London flat Hendrix was found dead from a drugs overdose in 1970, was found to be in contempt because she breached an undertaking that she would never repeat an allegation that Mrs Etchingham was an "inveterate liar" about her life with the rock star.

Miss Etchingham said Miss Danneman's book, The Inner Life of Jimi Hendrix, broke the undertaking by painting her as an "inveterate liar"

She said: "This is a victory for common sense and I am absolutely delighted. This has been an ongoing problem for me but I hope this is an end to it now.

"I was fed up that someone who only had a relationship with Jimi for three days claims she was engaged to him. It is absolutely bizarre that this has been going on for 26 years."

Mr Justice French, who described Miss Etchingham as being "for two and a half years the girlfriend, in the modern sense of the word, of Jimi Hendrix", awarded her costs, estimated at pounds 30,000.

But he made no order to commit Miss Danneman to prison or pay a fine after hearing she was in poor health and living on very little money from selling her paintings of Hendrix.

The battle between the two women goes back to the Seventies. In a series of News of the World articles, Miss Etchingham claimed that Miss Danneman did not do enough to save Hendrix after he died from an overdose of sleeping tablets. Miss Danneman, of Seaford, East Sussex, wrote her libellous book in which she quoted Hendrix as saying that Mrs Etchingham was a girl "who will cheat and lie for money".