TUBBIN' TWOSOME Lachey, Minnillo (Photo: Getty Images)
Having boinked his girlfriend in view of a paparazzo's lens, Nick Lachey is making a belated all-out effort to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
Lachey's lawyer, pitbull-to-the-stars Marty Singer, is threatening severe legal action against Fame Pictures, the agency whose freelancer caught Lachey and Vanessa Minnillo romping naked and apparently having hot-tub sex on the balcony of their private villa in Mexico.
"We intend to bring the full weight of the law against anyone who violates our clients' rights," Singer said in a statement to Radar.
A number of photos from the series were published two weeks ago in Life & Style, which bought only the first-run rights, putting them back on the market after a week. At that point, according to sources, OK magazine negotiated a deal to obtain the permanent copyright to the the images. (Though the New York Daily News claims OK agreed to pay $400,000 for the photos, sources with knowledge of the deal say the price was actually in the mid-to-high five figures.) The magazine then turned around and offered to keep them out of circulation if Lachey and Minnillo would give them an interview and pose for a cover shoot. They consented.