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Friday, March 29, 2024 | Back issues
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Shannen Doherty Blames Managers for Cancer

LOS ANGELES (CN) - Financial management errors she likens to a Ponzi scheme are forcing Shannen Doherty to undergo rigorous and costly breast cancer treatment, she claims in court.

Doherty, 44, sued financial management firm Tanner Mainstain Glynn & Johnson, and her former financial manager Steven D. Blatt, claiming their mismanagement caused her to lose health insurance for a year as her breast cancer spread.

"The firm and former partner Blatt specialize in fleecing actors and entertainment industry professionals. After gaining control of their clients' cash and assets, they find a way to lose it, sometimes by gross incompetence, sometimes by self-dealing and outright theft," Doherty in the Aug. 19 complaint in Superior Court.

"Along the way, they habitually deceive their clients, going so far as to set up bogus transactions, to conceal their misdeeds, errors and omissions. The firm has the hallmark of a Ponzi scheme."

Instead of getting a "lifetime of financial security," Doherty says, the defendants' clients are left with "promises broken, tax liens and related penalties, debt they never needed, depressed credit scores, and with the ultimate question: Where did the money go?"

Doherty says she hired the defendants to handle her business and financial affairs in July 2009, in exchange for 5 percent of her annual income. She says they failed to pay her medical insurance premiums, causing her to lose coverage for all of 2014, causing her to skip routine medical checkups.

When her coverage resumed this year, Doherty says, she learned she had breast cancer that spread during 2014 and now she faces a mastectomy and chemotherapy instead of less invasive procedures that could have stopped it.

She says she has incurred "significant medical expenses" and "will incur exponentially greater expenses as her treatment continues" in addition to "severe emotional distress" and inability to work during treatment, all of which could have been avoided had the financial firm done what Doherty hired it to do.

Doherty says she fired the firm last year upon learning of other mismanagement, including "strange and unexplained transfers" to Blatt and others, overcharges for management fees, improper filing and payment of taxes, diverting insurance payments, an "unorganized and cryptic fashion" of maintaining accounting records, and other irregularities.

"This is a case about crooked business managers who not only stole from their clients but habitually blundered the most critical tasks of the profession," Doherty says in the complaint.

She seeks punitive damages for breach of contract, bad faith, breach of fiduciary duty, conversion, negligence and business law violations.

Officials for Los Angeles-based Tanner Mainstain Glynn & Johnson were not immediately available for comment Wednesday. Nor was Doherty's attorney, Devin McRae, with Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae.

Doherty became famous portraying Brenda Walsh on "Beverly Hills, 90210" from 1990 to 1994 and Prue Halliwell in "Charmed," from 1998 to 2001.

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