Zooey Deschanel. Photo courtesy of Ellen TV.
Summary: Zooey Deschanel is in a legal battle with her former management company over alleged unpaid commissions.
Having a baby is usually a joyous occasion, but to Zooey Deschanel’s former managers, a pregnancy is an excuse to blow off court!
The New Girl actress is being sued by her ex-managers, who claim that Deschanel owes them commissions on the show. They filed the claim in 2015, and they said that she used her pregnancy to blow off an April 21 deposition, according to Radar Online.
Deschanel, 37, had her child on May 9, and since then, she has refused to give any available dates to show up in court.
Deschanel was represented by the company Seven Summits for nearly twenty years, and during that time, they had an agreement that she would pay 10% commission to them on every job earned.
Seven Summits said that Deschanel cut them off from her TV paychecks, and they also said that she owes them a percentage off of the sale of her website, Hello Giggles, which reportedly was bought for tens of millions of dollars.
Deschanel made a name for herself as a quirky actress with a strong singing voice. Besides being the lead in Fox’s New Girl, she also starred in Elf and 500 Days of Summer. Additionally, she was in a band called She and Him that toured around the country.
Besides those projects, Deschanel launched the millennial website Hello Giggles in 2011, and the site was known for its positive, feminist content. It sold to Time Inc. in 2015 for $30 million. Deschanel said that she did not owe her management company a commission on that sale because it was not an entertainment-related endeavor.
When Seven Summits sued Deschanel for her failure to pay, she countersued, stating that she didn’t owe them anything and that they were also not entitled to a percentage of her income from any future endeavors.
Additionally, the actress alleged that her management company used her for their own promotional purposes. According to Radar Online, she said that one of Seven Summits’ partners, Sarah Jackson, once brought strangers into her dressing room to drum up more business.
Seven Summits denied Deschanel’s claims and demanded that her countersuit be dismissed. On June 27, they said that they learned that the actress had received a bonus from the movie 500 Days of Summer and that she had withheld it from them.
Deschanel is married to Jacob Pechenik, and they recently welcomed their second child, son Charlie Wolf Pechenik. They couple also have a daughter named Elsie.
“Zooey, Jacob and their daughter Elsie are overjoyed to welcome the newest member of their family,” Deschanel’s rep told PEOPLE in May.
Seven Summits is a talent management company that said it had worked with Deschanel since 1996 until 2013, and they said that they had nurtured the unknown into “one of the most famous actresses in the world.”
Seven Summits is represented by attorneys Bryan Freedman and Steven Stiglitz at Freedman + Taitelman, and Deschanel is being represented by Marty Singer, according to The Hollywood Reporter.