Debt-saddled photographer
Annie Leibovitz may have
resolved her dispute with the company that loaned her $24 million, but she still faces a mountain of legal issues.
A review of court records this week turned up two more vendors who recently sued Leibovitz’s studio over unpaid bills. There are now at least five separate lawsuits pending against Leibovitz.
Four of the suits are from vendors who say the Leibovitz Studio owes them a combined total of over $794,000. The fifth is a
copyright infringement suit filed by photographer
Paolo Pizzetti.
All four vendors claim no one at Leibovitz Studio has disputed their invoices—the studio simply refused to respond to payment requests.
In September 2008, Leibovitz entered into an agreement with Art Capital Group to borrow $22 million, later upped to $24 million. Art Capital sued Leibovitz in July, but said Friday it would drop the suit, having reached an agreement with Leibovitz to extend the maturity of the loan.
Leibovitz has been directing all comments through a spokesperson. On Friday, she released a statement expressing appreciation for Art Capital and thanking “family, friends, and colleagues for being there for me.”
One recent suit, filed August 27 by Mary Howard Studio in Brooklyn, claims Leibovitz Studio failed to pay $165,144 in invoices.
Mary Howard is a set designer who worked with Leibovitz on high-profile ad shoots for Disney, American Express and Louis Vuitton.
Attached to Howard’s lawsuit are a series of invoices that run through April 2009, suggesting that Leibovitz was having trouble paying bills even after she took out the loan to help get her finances in order.
Mary Howard Studio claims it performed work on 18 Leibovitz shoots from 2007 to 2009. Among them were major advertising shoots for Disney, Louis Vuitton, American Express, The Peninsula Hotels and other clients. Mary Howard says it billed Leibovitz for $177,894 over three years, but Leibovitz paid only $12,750.
The bills indicate that the charges were often for overages that exceeded the advance estimates, which had already been paid. For example, Mary Howard billed Leibovitz Studio a total of $51,668 for an American Express shoot with
Ellen DeGeneres. That included set design, props, assistants, transportation and an administration charge. An estimated advance of $38,850 had already been paid, leaving Leibovitz Studio on the hook for $12,818.
The lawsuits provide a window into the high costs of a typical Leibovitz shoot. Some of the shoots mentioned in the Mary Howard lawsuit were also cited in a lawsuit filed last year by The Art Department, which represents a stylist who worked with Leibovitz. For a Disney shoot starring
Jessica Biel as Pocahontas, Art Department billed Leibovitz $55,271 for the services of stylist
Nicoletta Santoro. Mary Howard charged $39,818 for the set design and props.
Howard’s lawsuit was filed in May, and again in July, in the State Supreme Court of New York, Kings County.
Separately, a New York staffing firm, RWP Solutions, says Leibovitz Studio owes it $15,855 for placement services performed in 2008.
The RWP Solutions suit says the placement firm referred two candidates for employment to the Leibovitz studio:
Margaret Copeland and
Ansley Papizan, both of whom were eventually hired. The RWP suit was filed in the Civil Court for the City of New York, New York County.
The two other vendor lawsuits against Leibovitz have shown little activity since they were filed last year.
The Art Department Creative Services
sued Leibovitz Studio in November 2008, alleging $386,467 in unpaid bills. There is no answer to the lawsuit on file. The case was filed at Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County.
B2Pro Lighting, then doing business as Briese USA sued Leibovitz in March 2008 for failing to pay for service and equipment in 2006 and 2007. The parties reached a resolution over a portion of the lawsuit, but charges of $221,715 still need to be resolved, a B2Pro rep
told PDN earlier this year. The case was filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County.
The Mary Howard Studio lawsuit was first reported this week by the
New York Post.
