{"id":2458,"date":"2024-08-30T19:35:20","date_gmt":"2024-08-30T19:35:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/revlon-sues-employees-for-sabotage\/"},"modified":"2024-08-30T19:35:20","modified_gmt":"2024-08-30T19:35:20","slug":"revlon-sues-employees-for-sabotage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/revlon-sues-employees-for-sabotage\/","title":{"rendered":"Revlon Sues Employees For ‘Sabotage’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tRevlon is suing several former employees over allegations that they \u201csabotaged\u201d the company\u2019s decades-old fragrance partnership with Britney Spears and took the business to a competitor.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a case filed Monday (Aug. 26) in Manhattan federal court, attorneys for Revlon and subsidiary Elizabeth Arden claim that four ex-staffers stole trade secrets and breached their contracts when they jumped ship to upstart rival Give Back Beauty and took the Britney account with them.<\/p>\n

\n\tThough an initial delay in Spears re-signing the 20-year perfume partnership deal was \u201cattributed to Ms. Spears being preoccupied with other matters,\u201d Revlon claims it eventually realized that its own executives had been orchestrating a corporate heist.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cRevlon and Elizabeth Arden were completely unaware that Revlon\u2019s own team was actively sabotaging one of their most valuable licensing relationships,\u201d the company\u2019s lawyers claim.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe case does not name Spears as a defendant nor accuse her of any wrongdoing.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs defendants, the lawsuit names the four employees \u2014 Vanessa Kidd<\/strong>, Dominick Romeo<\/strong>, Reid Mulvihill<\/strong> and Ashley Fass<\/strong> \u2014 as well as Give Back Beauty itself. None of the defendants immediately returned messages seeking comment on the lawsuit\u2019s allegations.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen at the peak of her powers, Spears signed a deal with Elizabeth Arden in 2004 to develop branded fragrances and other cosmetics. When she released \u201cCurious\u201d later that year, it quickly became the top selling fragrance of the year and reportedly pulled in more than $100 million<\/a> in sales.<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to a 2013 report<\/a> by the Hollywood Reporter<\/em>, \u201cCurious\u201d had sold more than 500 million bottles over its first decade, and the overall Spears-Arden partnership, featuring many other scents, was pulling in $30 million a year in sales.<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to the new lawsuit, Revlon had historically renewed its partnership with Britney in five-year intervals, and the latest iteration was set to expire at the end of 2024. When negotiations began late last year, the company says it had \u201cevery expectation that the relationship would continue.\u201d<\/p>\n

But according to the lawsuit, Give Back Beauty had launched a \u201ccampaign to obtain the Britney Brands fragrance business,\u201d including contacting the Elizabeth Arden staffers as early as February: \u201cThis was obviously a carefully planned and executed grab by GBB for the Revlon fragrance business.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThough Revlon says it struck a tentative deal with Britney\u2019s team, the agreement had not been finalized in May, when staffers who had worked on the deal began \u201cdecamping to GBB.\u201d Less than a month later, the lawsuit says, Give Back Beauty inked its own deal with Britney.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe speed with which Britney Brands signed its deal with GBB was unprecedented for the Britney Brands organization and could not have been accomplished without the benefit of the Revlon employees\u2019 deep knowledge of the misappropriated proprietary information about the relationship and GBB\u2019s unlawful utilization of that information,\u201d Revlon\u2019s lawyers write.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lawsuit takes particular aim at Kidd, a senior vice president for global marketing of fragrances who had spent years working on the Britney account and was allegedly the first to jump ship.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAt the same time that defendant Kidd was negotiating with Britney Brands on Revlon\u2019s behalf, she had interviewed and accepted a job offer with GBB,\u201d the company\u2019s lawyers write. \u201cKidd effectively acted as a double-agent, assisting GBB in taking the Britney Brands business away from plaintiffs while she was charged with cementing an extension for Elizabeth Arden and purported to be doing so.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe case claims that before she left, Kidd accessed more than 250 electronic files that contained proprietary information, including about the Britney partnership. Revlon says the \u201clogical inference\u201d is that she was \u201carming herself and her new employer\u201d with info that could be used to \u201crapidly recreate the supply and distribution chains Elizabeth Arden had spent 20 years developing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn technical terms, the lawsuit accuses the ex-staffers and Give Back Beauty of theft of trade secrets and so-called tortious interference with their business and contracts. It also accuses the individual employees of breach of their contracts and breach of their duty of loyalty to Revlon.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a statement to Billboard<\/em>, Revlon stressed that the lawsuit did not accuse Spears or her team of wrongdoing and said \u201cwe value our 20-year partnership and wish Britney all the best.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a company, we will always take steps to protect our intellectual property,\u201d Revlon said in the statement. \u201cWe have filed this complaint because it became clear to us that GBB and the four former employees named in the suit unlawfully used Revlon\u2019s proprietary information and trade secrets \u2014 and we are confident in the merits of our case.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Revlon is suing several former employees over allegations that they \u201csabotaged\u201d the company\u2019s decades-old fragrance partnership with Britney Spears and took the business to a competitor. In a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2459,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[676,3243,2470,479],"class_list":["post-2458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-employees","tag-revlon","tag-sabotage","tag-sues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}