At the very least two Wilhelmina fashions have taken their gripes with the famed company to the courts.
Alfredo Nemer and Malik Lindo-Eire have filed separate lawsuits towards the company, claiming Wilhelmina induced them to signal a brand new three-year administration settlement underneath false pretenses — together with concealing the upcoming termination of their longtime brokers, Matt Belief and Gene Kogan, in keeping with their lawsuits.
“The one senior agent remaining within the division, Jessica Rosenberg, subsequently resigned, leaving Defendant’s males’s division largely within the arms of junior workers,” says Lindo-Eire’s lawsuit, which additional accuses the company of “mishandling key alternatives” that in the end value him gigs.
Nemer and Lindo-Eire’s lawsuits come on the heels of insiders revealing to Web page Six that there was a “massacre” at Wilhelmina with prime execs, together with the mannequin’s brokers, fleeing.
“It’s like they’re again at sq. one. They’ve decimated their total males’s staff,” a supply advised us this month in reference to the management of director Cory Bautista and the agency’s CFO/COO Guarav Pahwa.
Sources advised us on the time that a number of fashions have been looking for to get out of their contracts as a result of adjustments.
In Nemer and Lindo-Eire’s case, they signed their agreements believing Kogan and Belief would stay their brokers, their court docket papers allege.
“In actuality, [Wilhelmina] knew it was about to terminate each Belief and Kogan, and intentionally hid that truth, figuring out that [Nemer] wouldn’t have signed the 2025 Settlement and would have left [Wilhelmina] with them, had he recognized the reality,” Nemer’s lawsuit states.
Insiders inform Web page Six that extra fashions are anticipated to file related fits. One supply acquainted with the state of affairs blasted Pahwa as “an accountant with no understanding of the style enterprise.”
However Wilhelmina’s lawyer Matthew Heerde dismissed the lawsuits as “fully meritless and only a low cost trick by a competing modeling company who needs to take fashions away from Wilhelmina.”
“The problems are unrelated to the Vogue Staff Act, which Wilhelmina absolutely helps and is absolutely compliant with. We now have little question the court docket will absolutely implement the contracts that Mr. Lindo-Eire and Mr. Nemer signed with Wilhelmina,” he mentioned.
Pahwa beforehand advised us, “Whereas we are able to’t touch upon particular mannequin contracts or former personnel hypothesis, we stay targeted on strengthening all divisions and guaranteeing continued success for our expertise and companions.”
