Beyonce Faces $100M Lawsuit From Video Game Maker
Beyonce is being sued for $100 million after a New York judge granted a video game creator permission to do so Tuesday.
The Grammy award winning singer initially attempted to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Gate Five LLC, that claims Beyonce “double crossed” the company. However, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Ramos said she could not dismiss the civil suit, which was filed after the singer deserted the company that was supposed to create a video game with her.
Gate Five filed the suit last April, claiming that Beyonce’s backed out on their deal after excessive financial demands, which ultimately caused the loss of business and jobs.
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The suit said the company would take legal action against the actress for “bad faith. breach of contract so callous that, on what appeared to be a whim, she destroyed Gate Five’s business and drove 70 people into unemployment, the week before Christmas [2010].”
The game would have been called “Starpower: Beyonce,” and would have been the singer’s first venture into the video game industry.
In a New York Magazine report, Gate Five founder Greg Easley spoke about his reasoning for filing the suit.
"In early December everything was still a go. And then the week of Christmas, she said that's it, I don't want to hear from you guys, go away, resulting in 70 people losing their jobs," Easley said. "We'd much rather make a game than litigate. But we want to recover damages that Gate Five suffered."
The lawsuit states that the singer made unethical choices by backing out of the agreement at the last minute, which even her father disagreed with.
"Her actions were so unscrupulous that her then manager (who is also her father) renounced them, while a senior executive of the company that had agreed to finance the project condemned her conduct as "morally reprehensible" in an email he sent to one of her talent agents," the lawsuit said.
The suit claimed that the video game company lost millions of dollars in production, and wants to stop the singer from participating in any other video game ventures after learning about the process from the company.
However, Beyonce’s lawyers maintained that she had the right to walk away from the venture with Gate Five, which did not secure project finances by a mid-Nov. 2010 deadline, New York Daily News reported.
