Former Republic Records President Charlie Walk has sued his ex-lawyer Marc Kasowitz for “legal malpractice” over the handling of sexual misconduct allegations in 2018 that resulted in Walk’s exit from Universal Music Group.
According to a lawsuit filed in New York on Thursday (March 25), Walk is seeking $60 million in damages for Kasowitz’s alleged “botched representation” during Walk’s departure from UMG, which the suit says “had catastrophic results for Mr. Walk’s career”.
Walk exited Republic Records after five years with the company in 2018, having denied the allegations.
Those accusations of sexual harassment were levelled at Walk by a former colleague called Tristan Coopersmith, who published an open letter on a now-non-existent blog in January 2018.
Coopersmith accused Walk of inappropriate behaviour in the workplace at Sony‘s Columbia Records, around 15 years prior to the blog being published.
Walk was EVP of Creative Marketing and Promotion of the Sony label at the time of the alleged incident.
According to the legal document filed last week, in 2018, Walk, then President of UMG’s Republic, “was on top of the music world” having been “in the music business for 30 years, having worked with artists from Beyoncé to Ariana Grande, and had just started a TV show”.
Detailing Walk’s remuneration as a UMG employee prior to his exit, the claim adds that he was earning “at least $3.5 million a year” and that he was in the middle of negotiations for a new five-year contract worth $20 million.
Walk’s suit suggests he was “likely” to have maintained this level of income for at least 15 more years, but alleges that “UMG’s spite and Kasowitz’s ineptitude destroyed all of this”.
The lawsuit argues that, “perceiving Mr. Walk as too big to control, too expensive to keep, and not wanting to lose him to a rival such as Warner, UMG kneecapped him, so that it could both fire him, and make him un-hireable by anyone else”.
“[P]erceiving Mr. Walk as too big to control, too expensive to keep, and not wanting to lose him to a rival such as Warner, UMG kneecapped him, so that it could both fire him, and make him un-hireable by anyone else”.
Charlie Walk lawsuit vs. Kasowitz (in which UMG is not named as a defendant)
Note that Universal isn’t actually named as a defendant in this case – only Kasowitz and his firm Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP are.
Walk and Universal agreed to the exec’s departure following an internal investigation by UMG into Walk’s contact during his tenure at the Vivendi-owned company.
That investigation coincided with a Rolling Stone report from February 2018 that detailed allegations of sexual misconduct levelled at Walk by five women who worked with / claim to have worked with the exec at various points across his tenure at Sony and then Universal/Republic.
In his lawsuit, Walk alleges that at the height of the “highly charged” #MeToo allegations coming out in the entertainment industry at the time, “UMG willfully disseminated a 15-year-old canard… that Mr. Walk had sexually harassed an employee at another company (Sony), as a pretext to threaten to fire him for cause unless he quietly resigned.”
Walk further alleges that UMG “publicized its purported internal investigation of him to create a pretext for him to be fired”.
Walk’s suit argues that the point of the situation being handled in this manner “was for the public to associate” Walk with Harvey Weinstein. The sole reason that this alleged ploy worked, according to Walk, “is because Kasowitz – who was hired to be Mr. Walk’s heroic defender – passively cooperated with UMG”.
That cooperation ultimately saw Walk sign a settlement agreement with Universal, under the advice of Kasowitz.
Yet today Walk claims he “never would have entered into [this settlement] but for the negligence of Kasowitz and the Kasowitz Firm, who failed to advise him that he possessed viable claims against UMG for breach of its obligation to keep any complaints regarding sexual harassment private and confidential, for not conducting a bona fide investigation—let alone a thorough one—and for threatening to terminate him for cause where none existed.”
Adds Walk’s lawsuit: “The simple fact is that, as so many in the entertainment industry were eager to do during the frenzied and fearful atmosphere of the early days of the #MeToo movement, UMG engaged in an all-too convenient ‘rush to judgment’ to utterly erase Mr. Walk from his existence in the music business. UMG ‘cancelled’ Mr. Walk based on no credible evidence and in order to settle old professional scores.
“Mr. Walk was not alone in being unjustly accused and “cancelled” during this time period. Former Universal Pictures president of marketing Josh Goldstine and executive vice president Seth Byers were similarly, and publicly, fired and humiliated based on flimsy to nonexistent evidence, innuendo, and hearsay. Mr. Goldstine and Mr. Byers fought back against their wrongful terminations, however, and were vindicated.”
Elsewhere in the claim, which you can read in full for yourself here, Walk notes that UMG was contractually “required to protect the privacy and confidentiality of all parties involved in any allegations of sexual harassment”.
Adds the suit: “Indeed, UMG had a detailed internal process for investigating any claims of sexual harassment involving its employees — a process that it had strictly adhered to with other executives, but which it entirely failed to follow when it came to Mr. Walk.
“Instead of protecting Mr. Walk’s privacy and confidentiality, UMG willfully engaged in his public character assassination, first informing all UMG employees that Mr. Walk was essentially guilty until proven innocent and encouraging them to come forward if they had similar claims to level against Mr. Walk and then making pronouncements to the media.
“This was especially outrageous as the unsubstantiated online blog posts concerned allegations from 15 years beforehand, at another company, when Mr. Walk was an executive at Sony Music Entertainment.”
“[Since] joining UMG in 2013, Mr. Walk had not once been the subject of a Human Resources complaint of any sort—especially sexual harassment.”
Charlie Walk lawsuit
Walk notes that since joining Universal in in 2013, he “had not once been the subject of a Human Resources complaint of any sort – especially sexual harassment” and argues that “UMG failed to make any effort to substantiate these spurious online accusations”.
Rather than conducting an “impartial and thorough investigation”, alleges Walk, Universal “did the opposite” and “accepted the false claims at face value because it was convenient to do so”.
Walk says that “Less than 24 hours after Coopersmith’s unsubstantiated blog post”, on January 30, 2018, a company-wide email was issued to UMG employees stating that they “may be aware of yesterday’s media reports concerning allegations of misconduct by Charlie Walk while he was an executive at Sony”.
This internal UMG memo informed staff that an independent law firm had been engaged “for UMG employees to contact if they had encountered similar experiences”.
Walk claims that this statement was issued by UMG “without receiving his consent” and that “in so doing, UMG violated its obligation to protect the privacy and confidentiality of all parties involved”.
Walk’s legal claim then attacks Kasowitz’s conduct at the time that this was all playing out, arguing that “a reasonably competent attorney could have used these clear and severe breaches to either beat UMG back from firing Mr. Walk or obtain millions of dollars for him in damages, as other wrongfully accused celebrities have done”.
The claim adds: “It was under these circumstances, when Mr. Walk was most in need of a tireless legal advocate to fight for his rights against UMG, that he turned to Kasowitz and the Kasowitz Firm for legal representation.
“Instead of a fighter for his client, Kasowitz turned out to be passive and uninformed about the true facts of Mr. Walk’s case, and quickly pressured him to enter into settlement agreement that was not in Mr. Walk’s best interest.
“Instead of reasonably investigating Mr. Walk’s legitimate breach of contract claims, Kasowitz was so eager to collect a quick paycheck that he pressured his client to sign a one-sided settlement agreement with UMG.”
“Instead of a fighter for his client, Kasowitz turned out to be passive and uninformed about the true facts of Mr. Walk’s case.”
Charlie Walk lawsuit
Walk’s 22-page lawsuit also suggests: “Given these facts, any reasonably competent attorney would have vigorously pursued Mr. Walk’s claims against UMG in binding arbitration, as UMG’s inexcusable breach of its own written policy had caused Mr. Walk tremendous damage to his career and reputation”.
Instead, says Walk, “Kasowitz and the Kasowitz Firm completely failed to communicate to Mr. Walk that UMG had engaged in a breach of its written policy to maintain his privacy and confidentiality in connection with any complaints of sexual harassment.
“On the contrary, they advised Mr. Walk that he had no choice but to quickly enter into a settlement agreement with UMG.”
Walk claims that he paid Kasowitz approximately $176,321.28 in attorney’s fees during his dispute with UMG dispute and argues that he’s entitled to being repaid this money.
The total compensatory damages Walk is demanding “as a direct and proximate result” of Kasowitz’s “professional negligence and legal malpractice” is $60m, which Walk’s suit says is “a reasonable calculation of what he would have made over the remaining years of his career, plus interest, costs and attorney’s fees”.
A spokesperson for Kasowitz told The Hollywood Reporter: “This complaint is a false and defamatory piece of work which Mr. Walk and his attorneys should be ashamed of and will regret.
“Our firm represented Charlie Walk in connection with his separation from UMG following an internal investigation by UMG. We provided Mr. Walk with litigation and non-litigation options and, based on his consultation with the firm and other advisors, he chose a non-litigation course, which resulted in settlement.”
“We are confident the case will dismissed, at which point we will pursue appropriate remedies against Mr. Walk and the law firms that have filed this egregiously false pleading.”
Kasowitz spokesperson
The spokesperson added: “Now, because Mr. Walk has been unsuccessful in his professional endeavors, he has filed a patently frivolous complaint against the firm.
“We are confident the case will dismissed, at which point we will pursue appropriate remedies against Mr. Walk and the law firms that have filed this egregiously false pleading.”
Last month, Walk’s upstart music distribution and A&R service Music Mastery partnered with Video and audio streaming platform LiveXLive Media.Music Business Worldwide