A judge in Florida has rejected a lawsuit from a freelance photographer who was seeking more than $2 million in damages for photographs contaminated in an anthrax attack on a newspaper reports The New York Sun.

Greg Mathieson claimed to have lost about 1,500 images which were being stored at American Media, the publisher of the National Enquirer, Star, and Weekly World News when a quantity of anthrax was sent through the mail in 2001.

Mathieson’s pictures, mainly of celebrities such President Clinton and his family, Frank Sinatra and Princess Diana, were destroyed when the building was being disinfected.

The photographer claimed that a picture editor for American Media verbally promised to pay $1,500 for each photo lost. However the publisher said in court that their liability was limited to that described in their terms of business letter that Mathieson accepted when he submitted the images.

Presiding Judge Donald Middlebrooks agreed and said that oral agreement could not supersede written “term sheets” that accompanied the photos.