To date, Women claims that 55 models – including Anna Ewers, Behati Prinsloo Levine, Giedre Dukauskaite, Alexina Graham, Ophelie Guillermand, Alana Zimmer, and Alicia Burke – have been lured to Elite. Taken together, the “raid” on the 55 models – whose “annual bookings exceed $22 million” – is part of “an unlawful scheme was carefully planned and orchestrated to inflict maximum harm on Women,” the latter asserts. Women claims that it only learned of the new contract terms over the past two weeks when models “started invoking the provisions that Leccese added,” including the key man clause.
With that clause and others in place, the defendants then successfully encouraged 16 model managers, who “represented almost all of the models at Women,” to leave the company and join Elite, a move that would prompt the newly-added key man clause to come into effect.
Women Models filed an “emergency action” in a New York state court on Tuesday to put a stop the an alleged “conspiracy designed to destroy one of the top modeling agencies in the world by unlawfully raiding its employees and models.” On the receiving end of the newly-filed suit: Elite Model Management and a handful of individuals tied to the agency, who allegedly orchestrated a “mass exodus” of 16 model managers and 55 models from Women to Elite between March and July 2019.Īccording to the complaint, which Women filed in New York Supreme Court, as first reported by the New York Post, the $22 million-plus scheme enacted by Elite got its start when Dejan Markovi, the former Chief Executive Officer of Women, partnered with Sergio Leccese, Women’s former Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, “to sabotage Women from within.” This included “unilaterally changing Women’s contracts to enable Women’s models to cut ties with more easily.” Specifically, Women asserts that “Leccese secretly modified some of the models’ contracts with Women to add a ‘key man clause,’ which allowed the model to terminate her contract if 50% of Women’s model managers left.”
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