Courtesy of EURWeb
For those who believe that a Hollywood actress would do practically anything in an endorsement deal, Octavia Spencer has filed a lawsuit that suggests otherwise, notes The Hollywood Reporter in the below exclusive.
Spencer, who won an Academy Award for best supporting actress in 2011′s Help, says that when she agreed to endorse Sensa Products, she made it clear that she would only promote a “healthier lifestyle” and not significant weight loss. She says she passed up a $3 million offer from another weight loss company to take Sensa’s $1.25 million one (with an additional $100,000 going to charity) because the company agreed to various stipulations, including that the ad campaign wouldn’t focus on significant weight transformation, wouldn’t use before and after photographs and wouldn’t be placed in tabloid magazines or on gossip websites.
But according to a breach-of-contract and fraud lawsuit filed on Wednesday in L.A. Superior Court, the ad campaign didn’t go so well, and at some point, after the actress had lived up to her side of the agreement by losing the contractually required amount of weight, Sensa began “scheming” to extradite itself from paying the actress.
Among Sensa’s alleged actions was sending the actress a termination notice dated Aug. 6 that claimed Spencer was in breach of her agreement by insisting upon adding the hashtag “#spon” (meaning “sponsor”) at the end of her tweets for the diet product company. “Sensa manufactures and markets a diet product designed to trick one’s brain,” says Spencer’s lawsuit. “Therefore, it’s not surprising that it would manufacture allegations against its most prominent spokesperson, Octavia Spencer.”
