Octavia Spencer wins lawsuit against weight-loss company

The Help actor granted almost $1m in settlement for soured endorsement deal, while Michael Keaton wins breach-of-contract lawsuit over directing debut, The Merry Gentleman

Octavia Spencer has won a court ruling for wrongful termination after a weight-loss firm shut down a sponsorship deal with the Oscar-winning actor.

Spencer sued Sensa Products in August after the company cancelled its contract with the star and refused to pay the remaining $700,000 (£450,000) owed under its terms. The firm is said to have taken umbrage at the actor’s use of the hashtag #spon to identify sponsored tweets from her account that mentioned its products.

Spencer successfully argued that she was not obliged to avoid such Twitter furniture under the terms of her contract. She also said she had lost the 20 pounds required by the sponsorship deal, had posed for before and after photographs, and had allowed advertisements featuring her image to be placed in tabloid magazines.

Sensa Products, which is now insolvent, had earlier argued that Spencer reneged on her contractual commitment to put out only pre-approved tweets and also failed to deliver before and after shots. The company was not represented at the final hearing at the Los Angeles superior court. Judge Michael Stern granted Spencer a default verdict and ordered Sensa to pay the actor $940,000.

The actor is unlikely to receive that sum given the insolvent state of the company, but her lawyers said that was not the point. “This was always about principle for our client, Ms Spencer. She was taken advantage of by a company that is no stranger to misrepresentations,” lawyer Bryan Freedman of Freedman & Taitelman, told The Hollywood Reporter. “I am very proud of Octavia’s will to fight.”

In other Hollywood legal news, Michael Keaton has won a ruling against the production company that financed his directing debut, the 2008 Sundance film festival hit The Merry Gentleman. Keaton, who also starred in the film opposite Kelly MacDonald, had been sued for breach of contract, his pursuers arguing that he turned in a late final cut and refused to allow a version edited by the producers to screen at Sundance. They also accused him of going fly-fishing when he allegedly should have been working to complete the movie.

Illinois judge Gary Feinerman found in favour of Keaton. “It is undisputed that Keaton actually finished the film and that it was selected by the prestigious Sundance film festival, was shown at the festival’s largest venue, and received critical praise and nationwide publicity unusual for such a film,” he wrote. Feinerman conceded that, while Keaton took too long to finish the director’s cut of the film and should not have allegedly asked that his version to be screened at Sundance, the actor-director “worked harder to publicise the film than any other director of a comparably sized film”.

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