It looks like it takes desperate measures to get “Desperate Housewives” star Teri Hatcher to pay up as promised.
Jennifer Glassman, the former senior vice-president of Hatcher’s ISBE Production, is suing the former Bond girl for unnamed damages, alleging that she reneged on a 2006 deal to become business partners.
Naming Hatcher, along with ABC Studios, ISBE Productions and the Walt Disney Co., Glassman alleges in a nine-count complaint that she was promised she would, to quote from the suit filed in L.A. Superior Court Tuesday, “share in an even 50/50 split of all producing-related revenues and all monies generated by efforts of the partnership.”
Instead, the 24-page document says that after Glassman, a former PR and Paradigm Talent Agency executive, quit her lucrative job on Hatcher’s pleading and worked for the actress, who had “mood swings and unusual requests,” she was suddenly and “wrongfully terminated” in late February 2010.
Glassman, who was paid a salary by ABC Studios during the time she worked with Hatcher, says she was canned just before Hatcher cashed in on a Disney-backed website that the former Paradigm exec says she actually played a big part in creating. The filing also notes that “HATCHER purposely provided … misleading information just months prior to the successful launch of the gethatched.com website in New York, in an attempt to fool PLAINTIFF into abandoning her right to related compensation, royalties and credits for the and other projects she helped create.
After losing a $269.2 million jury trial to “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire creators Celador earlier this summer, another messy trial is probably the last thing that Disney CEO Bob Iger, who made an appearance on the stand in the Riverside, Calif., wants.
Here’s the thing – Disney and Teri Hatcher might not have many legal worries there. Glassman, who says in the suit she suffers from Chronic Fatigue and Epstein Barr syndromes, never formalized her 50/50 deal with Hatcher or ISBE. Instead she foolishly signed a blank contract that actually rendered her an “at-will employee” and let the actress easily fire her.
Which is what Teri Hatcher seems to have done. Mean, maybe, but against the law … unlikely.
Pamela Chelin contributed reporting to this story.
