The fur coat story that LALATE NEWS first broke is now headline national news. Why? One reason … You don’t mess with US Columbia students!

Markova, a Columbia student (studying the wonders of art history and philosophy), was first covered here on LALATE NEWS. Basically what happened is she went to a private party in New York with her fur coat that her grandmother gave her, a stunning $12,000 blond mink coat (that yes, matches Lindsay Lohan’s hair purrrrfectly), she sat near Lohan during the night, and when the night was over, so was the coat.

GONE!

And by the magic of tabloid heaven, in the days that followed, there was Lindsay Lohan wearing the fur that matched her hair, over and over and over again.

“The pictures speak for themselves,” said Merrill Cohen, Markova’s fur-tastic attorney. “They make it seem clear that wrongdoing took place.”

“Lindsay did not steal a coat!” says Lohan’s rep Leslie Sloane Zelnick to ABC NEWS.

Could the blondie and blonde coat be headed to coat? “If we filed suit, we would seek punitive damages in the six-figure range,” Cohen tells ABC “It has to be something that’s going to be substantial, that makes her accountable for what she did. How entitled can someone feel? I don’t know what her motivation was. Maybe it was rare to find a blond mink that matched her hair. If my client had gotten an apology (and the coat) the next day,” Cohen continued, “she would have rolled her eyes and said, ‘Party girl.’ But it wasn’t that way.”

And if you love your 6 degrees of separation … the party where the coat case occurred? A private birthday party Stavros Niarchos, former boyfriend to Lohan’s not so favorite Paris Hilton.

Below is a video of Lohan wearing the fur.