Jim Carrey claims deceased ex-girlfriend's family is trying to extort him

Jim Carrey has been defending himself in a wrongful death lawsuit waged against him by Cathriona White's estranged husband as well as her mother. White's family members claim that Carrey is to blame for the death of his former girlfriend and they want him to pay.

Now it looks like Jim Carrey has decided to fight back more than a year after the initial suit. He is countersuing Cathriona's family members, claiming that the lawsuit is just a post-death money grab. He even claimed they were trying to extort him by telling Carrey to pay up rather than get dragged through the mud with the media as they sort everything out.

Jim Carrey is not backing down

In his filing, Jim Carrey blasted the family of his deceased ex-girlfriend for attempting to blame him for the death of Cathriona White. He also was quick to condemn them for taking advantage of his celebrity status in order to shake him down for money.

According to the Los Angeles Times, he claimed that as an actor, he was stuck in a "Hobson’s choice of publicly fighting these false claims or confidentially settling the potential litigation for millions of dollars in order to save them from public embarrassment, ridicule, and pile-on litigation."

What he doesn't address is the fact that Cathriona White is dead. She took her own life just months after learning that she had contracted multiple sexually contracted diseases She also wrote that her diagnosis, coupled with Carrey dumping her, left her depressed and feeling worthless.

Her family believes that it was this depression.

Why did Cathriona White end her life?

Her family believes that it was this depression and her access to prescriptions that had been written for Jim Carrey under a pseudonym that led. to her death in September 2015.

Carrey is denying everything. He says that he did not pass any STDs to his former girlfriend despite evidence that he may have visited a clinic under an assumed name prior to Cathriona's diagnosis.

He also says that Cathriona stole his pills and that he never voluntarily gave them to her.

It seems that the new countersuit brought by Jim Carrey isn't an attempt to win money from Cathriona White's family. Instead, it seems more likely that Carrey is trying to shut down the litigation brought by Mark Burton and Brigid Sweetman.

Carrey even said "I will not give in" in his new lawsuit and accused Mark Burton and Brigid Sweetman of waging fraudulent charges against him. However, he has also refused to have a new test to determine which, if any, sexually transmitted diseases he may still carry. After all, he was accused of having at least one form of herpes. Considering that it never really goes away, that should be easy enough to determine through a simple blood test.