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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Model Says Agent Took Her For a Ride

LOS ANGELES (CN) - Oksana Grigorieva, a model, musician and Mel Gibson's girlfriend, claims Sammie Oriti pretends to be a legitimate manager and music promoter but lacks real contacts and uses clients for his own benefit.

Grigorieva says she hired Oriti as her talent agent and manager in 2004. Oriti claimed he was negotiating an endorsement deal with a "prominent lingerie company," according to the complaint in Superior Court.

Grigorieva says Oriti told her the company needed to see sample photos of her modeling its brand of skivvies. She claims Oriti promised she would retain ownership of the photos and that no one besides the two of them and the lingerie company would ever see them. So Grigorieva says she organized and paid for the photo shoot, but Oriti failed to seal the deal.

She claims Oriti refused to return the photos, first claiming that he needed them for negotiations with the lingerie company, then says he had lost them.

But in April this year, Grigorieva says, Oriti sold the photos to Radar Online, a "Web-based tabloid publication."

Grigorieva wants at least $500,000 in damages for breach of contract, conversion, privacy violation, misappropriation of the right of publicity, and an injunction to stop further use of the pictures.

She is represented by Brian Wolf and Todd Eagan with Lavely & Singer.

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