Love Is Blind, but will justice be, too?
Jeremy Hartwell, who appeared on the reality show’s second season, just filed a lawsuit against producers — and the allegations he’s making are really serious!
According to court documents obtained by TMZ on Wednesday, Jeremy is going after Netflix, the production company Kinetic Content, and the casting company Delirium TV with a class action lawsuit over alleged inhumane working conditions. In the suit, the entrepreneur claims the show manufactured its drama by forcing contestants to film the show while they were drunk, starving, sleep-deprived, and underpaid. Damn! Not the boujee 15 minutes of fame we bet he was hoping for!
Related: Love Is Blind Alum Shaina Hurley Gets Married In Courthouse Wedding!
Jeremy goes on to claim the only drinks cast were regularly provided were alcoholic beverages, energy drinks, soft drinks, and mixers. Notice that water wasn’t included in that list? That’s on purpose because H2O was allegedly strictly limited — WTF?! We get supplying the stars with lots of alcohol — that’s pretty common for reality TV — but to withhold water is dangerous!
Hartwell also alleged that producers would sometimes keep hotel room keys so contestants couldn’t get proper sleep. Even worse, they would allegedly tell hotel staff NOT to provide them with food! Apparently, the show liked to keep its cast members hungry to alter their emotions and decision-making skills. Yowza.
Because of the awful combination of being severely sleep-deprived, isolated from others, hungry, and often drunk, Jeremy is claiming the show runs under inhumane working conditions that left him feeling like a zombie after the show wrapped production. He also realized he’d been impacted by emotional manipulation during filming — something he probably couldn’t properly focus on amid production since his body was all out of sorts!
Related: Love Is Blind Star Shake Shows Off New Romance After Deepti Split
Oh, and all of this was happening while the cast was hardly making a buck despite the huge popularity of the Nick and Vanessa Lachey-hosted show! Per the Chicago native, producers paid the cast members a flat rate of $1,000 per week (earning a max of $8k for the season) — meaning they were forced to work up to 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, for just about $7.14 an hour. That’s less than half of LA County’s $15 minimum wage. Damn!
In a statement to Us Weekly on Wednesday, Hartwell’s attorney, Chantal Payton of Payton Employment Law, PC, said:
“They intentionally underpaid the cast members, deprived them of food, water and sleep, plied them with booze and cut off their access to personal contacts and most of the outside world. This made cast members hungry for social connections and altered their emotions and decision-making. The contracts required contestants to agree that if they left the show before filming was done, they would be penalized by being required to pay $50,000 in ‘liquidated damages.’ With that being 50 times what some of the cast members would earn during the entire time that they worked, this certainly had the potential to instill fear in the cast and enable production to exert even further control.”
“Required to pay $50,000”?! That’s WAY more than any of them were making in the first place!!
The reality star’s lawsuit now serves as “a proposed class action on behalf of all participants in Love Is Blind and other non-scripted productions” created by Kinetic Content from 2018 to 2022. Jeremy hopes the companies will face civil penalties for labor code violations. Netflix, Kinetic Content, and Delirium TV have yet to comment. Thoughts, Perezcious readers?! We know things were can be bad behind the scenes but this seems off the charts!!
[Image via Jeremy Hartwell/Instagram & Netflix/YouTube]
The post <i>Love Is Blind</i> Contestant Sues Netflix For EXTREME Alleged Labor Violations & Abusive Tactics -- YIKES! appeared first on Perez Hilton.