text: Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. 
   
   Several of Madonna's personal items, including the letter that ended the pop icon's relationship with rap legend Tupac Shakur, belong to an auction house and can be sold, a Manhattan judge ruled on Monday. 
   
   The items were originally up for bid last year, but the singer filed a temporary restraining order against New York auction house Gotta Have Rock and Roll to halt the sale, according to Reuters. 
   
   Madonna said in court documents that she was not aware until reading press reports that many of the items listed for auction, including the letter from her former boyfriend Shakur, were no longer in her possession, Reuters reported. 
   
   This is a 1993 file photo of Tupac Shakur. AP file 
   
   On Monday, Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Gerald Lebovits ruled that Gotta Have Rock had the right to sell the items, including the letter which went for a starting bid of $100,000 in 2017. 
   
   “We did substantial due diligence when we took all the Madonna items for auction. We were confident that Madonna had no claim whatsoever, and the judge clearly agreed with us,” said the co-owners of "Gotta Have Rock and Roll," Ed Kosinski & Pete Siegel. 
   
   Other items that can now be auctioned include a pair of Madonna's panties, an old checkbook, a hairbrush,personal photos and another letter, in which she talked about singer Whitney Houston and actress Sharron Stone. 
   
   The items will go back up for sale in July. NBC News was not immediately able to reach representatives for Madonna. ||||| Madonna has lost a legal battle to prevent the auction of personal items including a lock of her hair, her underwear and a breakup letter from former boyfriend, the late rapper Tupac Shakur. 
   
   The singer won a temporary block of the auction of 22 pieces in July 2016, telling a New York City court that her celebrity status “does not obviate my right to maintain my privacy, including with regard to highly personal items�?. 
   
   In a decision made public yesterday, judge Gerald Lebovits ruled that she had misdirected her legal action by targeting Darlene Lutz, the New York art collector who helped Madonna build a collection before the pair fell out. 
   
   Lebovits sided with Lutz, who claimed that the pair’s disputes had been settled in a 2004 legal agreement. The judge questioned why Madonna had pursued Ms Lutz rather than her own assistants, who Madonna claimed gave her possessions to the dealer. Lutz’s lawyer, Judd Grossman, called the decision “a total win�?, saying: “Ms Lutz is now free to do with her property as she pleases without any continued interference by Madonna.�? 
   
   Madonna is yet to comment on the ruling. 
   
   Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I never meant to hurt you’ ... Madonna and Tupac in March 1994. Photograph: Patrick McMullan/Getty 
   
   Auction house Gotta Have Rock and Roll has said it would continue with the sale of the items in July. In a statement, the organisation said it had been confident about the case and undertaken “substantial due diligence�? before announcing the initial auction. 
   
   Madonna and Tupac began dating in 1994. In the handwritten letter included in the auction, obtained by TMZ and dated 15 January 1995, the rapper says that his image would suffer from him dating a white woman. He expressed his discomfort with an interview in which the musician said: “I’m off to rehabilitate all the rappers and basketball players.�? 
   
   Madonna and Grimes lay bare cost of creative freedom for female artists Read more 
   
   “Can u understand that?�? he wrote. “For you to be seen with a black man wouldn’t in any way jeopardise your career. If anything it would make you seem that much more open & exciting. But for me at least in my previous perception I felt due to my ‘image’ I would be letting down half of the people who made me what I thought I was. I never meant to hurt you.�? The rapper died in 1996, aged 25, in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. 
   
   The auction contains a second letter, sent from Madonna to “J�?, in which she describes Whitney Houston and Sharon Stone as “horribly mediocre�?. ||||| However, Ms. Lutz added, “She didn’t take the route that Beyoncé did” — a reference to the pop star’s exhaustive personal archiving system. 
   
   Madonna’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The singer had previously said she did not know Ms. Lutz was in possession of the items until last year when the gossip site TMZ published the letter from Shakur. 
   
   Dated Jan. 15, 1995, the letter was written during Shakur’s incarceration at New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility for sexual assault, the year before his shooting death at age 25 in September 1996. In the letter, he alludes to his reasons for ending a relationship with Madonna. 
   
   “For you to be seen with a black man wouldn’t in any way jeopardize your career, if anything it would make you seem that much more open and exciting,” Shakur wrote. “But for me at least in my previous perception I felt due to my ‘image’ I would be letting down half of the people who made me what I thought I was.” 
   
   A second letter in the lot was an unsent draft written by Madonna to another former boyfriend, the actor John Enos. In it Madonna described two of her rivals, Whitney Houston and Sharon Stone, as “horribly mediocre,” adding, “They’re always being held up as paragons of virtue and some sort of measuring stick to humiliate me.” 
   
   Ms. Lutz said she came into possession of the items while frequently hanging around during that time in Madonna’s orbit, where she “tended to be a repository for a lot of stuff where people just thought: ‘Get rid of it.’” That included large piles fan mail that were often not examined at all, Ms. Lutz said. “I knew all of the assistants and stuff would get thrown in boxes and they would just go, ‘Hey, here’s some more.’”
target: – Bad news for Madonna: A judge on Monday said a New York auction house can go ahead and sell some of her personal stuff. Gotta Have Rock and Roll auctions got a hold of a pair of the singer's underwear, a letter Tupac Shakur wrote to her explaining why they had to break up, and other items of hers including a hairbrush, a checkbook, cassette tapes of unreleased recordings, a letter she wrote calling Whitney Houston and Sharon Stone "horribly mediocre," and photos. Madonna had obtained a temporary restraining order last year to halt the sale, saying she didn't know the items were no longer in her possession and believes someone took them from her home. But on Monday, a Manhattan judge ruled that the items belong to the auction house and the sale can go ahead, NBC News reports. The auction house says the sale will proceed in July. The Guardian and the New York Times explain that the judge found Madonna had targeted the wrong person in her legal action: Darlene Lutz, an art collector who helped Madonna build her collection before the two had a falling-out. Madonna claimed her assistants had given her things to Lutz, and the judge said Madonna should have targeted those assistants rather than Lutz. (Lutz herself once said that's how she came into the items, simply by collecting things that were otherwise going to be thrown out: "I knew all of the assistants and stuff would get thrown in boxes and they would just go, 'Hey, here’s some more.'") Lutz said she and the Material Girl had settled their disagreements in a 2004 legal agreement, and the judge sided with Lutz and found that that agreement prevented Madonna from suing. The judge also found that the statute of limitations to recover the items had passed. "Ms. Lutz is now free to do with her property as she pleases without any continued interference by Madonna," said Lutz's lawyer.