After Lady Gaga’s two French bulldogs were violently stolen from her dogwalker in 2021, the acclaimed pop star offered a $500,000 reward for their return — “no questions asked.” Jennifer McBride returned the dogs but got no reward, and a judge just said that’s OK.

That’s because of a legal rule known as the unclean-hands doctrine — or, the clean-hands doctrine. Whichever formulation one prefers, the point is the hands are supposed to be clean and, as you might suspect from how this story is going, they weren’t here. The doctrine stands for the principle that you can’t benefit from your own wrongdoing. That is, you need to come to the situation with clean hands, legally speaking.  

The problem for McBride, according to Judge Holly Fujie in Los Angeles, is that she pleaded no contest to receiving stolen property — i.e., the dogs in question. McBride claimed in her civil lawsuit against the multi-hyphenate star, born Stefani Germanotta, that she wasn’t involved in the brazen theft. But whether that’s so is beside the point for the purposes of sorting out this suit, because the judge observed that McBride still effectively conceded wrongdoing after the fact.

Thus, unclean hands. No reward. And no luck in McBride’s suit for breach of contract, fraud by false promise, and fraud by misrepresentation.

The Los Angeles Times reported that McBride had initially claimed she came across the dogs tied to a pole and then investigators found she was in a relationship with the father of one of the men accused of assaulting Gaga’s dog walker, Ryan Fischer.

So, one of the lessons here is, if you see a reward posting offering money with “no questions asked,” that’s not exactly true. The questions asked might include: Are you implicated in any related crime that put you in a position to collect the reward? If so, you should hope the answer is “no.”

Put differently, you need to keep your hands clean.