If ogling celebrities as they hit the self-destruct button is your idea of entertainment, Lindsay Lohan has certainly provided excellent value over many years.

She even poked fun at herself in a Super Bowl ad on Sunday, in which she lampooned her infamous DUI arrest.

But it seems that even for Lohan, there is a limit to how far you can push her about her notoriously hard-living lifestyle. After a guest on Fox News alleged the actor had been inhaling lines of cocaine with her mother, Dina Lohan, the actress on Monday issued a lawsuit against the TV channel.

The offending comment was made last February by Michelle Fields, a commentator on the Sean Hannity show. “Lindsay Lohan’s mom is doing cocaine with her,” Fields said.

To make matters worse, the remark was part of a panel discussion on celebrities who had killed themselves through drug overdoses, including Philip Seymour Hoffman who had recently died.

Lohan’s New York-based lawyers swiftly fired off a legal letter to Roger Ailes, chairman and chief executive of Fox News, at the channel’s Manhattan headquarters. The letter decried Fields’s comment as “outrageously slanderous and defamatory”.

Fox News’s response is not known, but whatever it did it clearly wasn’t enough to placate the Lohans.

In their lawsuit, mother and daughter claim both their characters and reputations have been smeared, and accuse Fox News of peddling “malicious innuendo”.