Chip and Joanna Gaines Lawsuit Latest News: 'Fixer Upper' Star's Former Business Partners Claim Gaines Knew About Lawsuit Since Last Year
After "Fixer Upper" star Chip Gaines responded to the fraud lawsuit his former business partners John Lewis and Richard Clark, the two have once again fired back.
For the uninitiated, Lewis and Clark are claiming that Gaines tricked them into selling their shares of the Magnolia Real Estate Company back in 2013 without telling them that HGTV has picked up "Fixer Upper," which Gaines still hosts with his wife Joanna.
Days after the lawsuit was filed, Gaines took to Twitter to respond:
Get Our Latest News for FREE
This suggested that Gaines was caught off guard about the lawsuit, but in an interview with In Touch Weekly, Lewis and Clark said that he knew about it since last year.
Lewis said that an email about the lawsuit "was sent by my lawyer to his email that he has had for 20 years" so there is no way this surprised the "Fixer Upper" host.
Lewis and Clark believe that Gaines deliberately withheld information about the show, which Magnolia is a big part of, being picked up by a big network.
"The bottom line is we owned a business together. We had been friends for over a decade. The choice could have been when he had the knowledge that there was a success on the horizon that he could have allowed his friend and business partner to enjoy that future success with him, and he chose not to do so," Lewis said.
"I knew they were filming a pilot. I had no idea that it was going to be aired on any network, let alone HGTV, and didn't know about that until two days after we signed over the company to Chip. I trusted what Chip was telling me — the business we owned together had no value," he went on to say.
Lewis and Clark are asking to be paid $1 million or the amount their stakes with Magnolia Realty would have been if they knew about the show, plus in-kind benefits and distributions.
Gaines' lawyer said that their camp is confident that the claims will be proven "meritless."
