(CN) — Jeremey Hartwell, a cast member on the second season of the Netflix reality show "Love Is Blind," has reached a settlement with the streaming service and the show's production company in a class action he filed in 2022 over a panoply of labor violations, including unpaid wages.
According to court documents filed Wednesday, Hartwell — acting as class representative — and Netflix have agreed to settle the putative class action for just under $1.4 million, to be divided between attorneys and approximately 144 former cast and crew members.
Neither the plaintiffs' attorneys nor Netflix's attorneys returned phone calls requesting a comment.
Each season of "Love Is Blind" follows 30 single men and women, who meet and communicate with each other in special-built pods so that they may hear but not see each other.
Only after one proposes marriage do they first lay eyes on one another. The show then follows the happy couple on a vacation to Mexico and to meet each others' parents. If all goes swimmingly, they get married.
Hartwell was a 36-year-old director and entrepreneur when he appeared on Season 2 of the show, which aired in 2022. He did not find love.
He did, however, find reasons to sue the popular streaming service, as well as the show's production company, Kinetic Content.
In the most recent version of his complaint, Hartwell accused Kinetic of creating "unsafe and inhumane working conditions for the cast," including by mantaining "excessive control over virtually every aspect of the lives of their shows’ cast" and "exerting complete domination over their time, schedule, and their ability to eat, drink, and sleep, and communicate with the outside world."
Cast members, Hartwell said, "were plied with an unlimited amount of alcohol without meaningful or regular access to appropriate food and water to moderate their inevitable drunkenness."
"The combination of sleep deprivation, isolation, lack of food, and an excess of alcohol ... contributed to inhumane working conditions and altered mental state for the cast," he added. This was all done, he said, all in the name of "entertainment value."
Hartwell also said that Kinetic had misclassified its employees as independent contractors and had denied paying them a "proper minimum wage and overtime pay" or providing them a meal time. Cast and crew were required to work 20 hours a day and seven days a week for $1,000 per week — an effective minimum wage of $7.14 per hour.
The proposed settlement of $1,395,000 includes $488,250 for the plaintiffs' attorneys — just over a third of the total award. Both figures need to be approved by a Superior Court Judge. A hearing on both the settlement and the class is scheduled for July.
Hartwell is not the only former cast member to have sued "Love Is Blind." Tran Dang, a woman who was filmed for Season 5 but was later edited out of the show, sued another cast member for sexual assault, naming the production company as a co-defendant.
"Producers made attempts to mask Plaintiff’s sexual assault by characterizing it as a lack of attraction on part of the Plaintiff," Dang wrote in her complaint. "When Plaintiff insisted an assault took place, Defendants Delirium TV and Kinetic Content questioned whether the problem was really one of communication and swept aside her concerns."
Kinetic tried to force that dispute into arbitration, but that attempt was rebuffed. On Thursday, a Texas appellate court ruled that the production company was not liable for the sexual assault claims because the incident took place in Mexico. However, the company is still on the hook for other claims, including false imprisonment and negligence.
In a legal fight of her own, Renee Poche,a former cast member who was mostly edited out of the show, said she fell in love with another cast member who turned out to be a homeless and violent drug addict. She said the producers pressured her into continuing the romance all the way up to the wedding altar, where she abruptly changed her mind and said, "I don't." In March, a judge ruled that Pochee was bound by her contract to work out her dispute in arbitration.
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