Range Media Partners‘ founders got caught with their sticky fingers in the CAA trade-secrets cookie jar, the Bryan Lourd-run uberagency claims in an amended complaint to its October 2024 lawsuit.
Or put another another way: In the truest of Hollywood litigation tradition, CAA has uncovered what it believes is the smoking gun of smoking guns in the multi-tiered battle with former staffers now at the self-described management company.
“Newly uncovered video footage, documents, photographs, and secret Telegram chats reveal an extensive plot by Range’s founders to steal from Creative Artists Agency, LLC, set up an illegal talent agency, and cover up its wrongdoing,” reads a heavily redacted amended complaint filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court by CAA’s outside counsel at Paul Hastings.
“This is what we now know,” adds the complaint, which has grown from four to six claims. “Driven by greed, hubris, the lure of shortcuts, and a willingness to betray trusting colleagues, a small group of then-current and former CAA agents in 2019 began plotting to leave CAA. Over the next months, they began stealing CAA’s trade secrets, poaching talent and employees from CAA, designing and operating an unlicensed talent agency, and deliberately and systematically destroying evidence of Range’s scheme [redacted].”
“They adopted spy-novel tropes to hide their plan,” CAA alleges of Range’s founders — former CAA and eOne exec Peter Micelli, and CAA talent agents Jack Whigham, Michael Cooper, Mick Sullivan and Dave Bugliari — and what ends they went to in order to get their hands on CAA’s crown jewels of strategy, technique and of course clients – big clients. “They used tools to avoid detection and eliminate digital fingerprints, fully aware of the legal risk. Encrypted ephemeral messaging was used to hide their illegal acts, including Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram. They secured and used ‘alternate’ and ‘burner’ cell phones.”
If this all sounds a bit like teenagers planning a banger of a weekend glamping in the mountains, you are picking up what the parental CAA is saying. Only here, capturing the interest and ambitions of the shifting agency world, the stakes might be a little higher than who brought the edibles and the WiFi hot spot.
“This conduct is illegal under multiple California laws, compelling CAA to take this action,” the suit reads.
Today’s filing comes almost a full five years after Micelli, Whigham, Cooper, Sullivan and Bugliari were among the well-connected core group that founded Range with big-bucks backing from hedge-fund kingpin and now New York Mets owner Steve Cohen. It also comes about nine months after the Artemis-owned CAA placed its initial complaint in the court docket to put what it calls Range’s “business model” of “pursuit of unlawful profit through deception” under the legal and ethical microscope.
What was allegedly stolen from CAA, according to CAA, was a lot. In a footnote in today’s filing, there is a list:
The trade secrets implicated here, at minimum, include the following materials: the confidential client and revenue lists that Whigham sent to his personal email address in March and June 2020; the hundreds of pages of confidential meeting notes that Sullivan sent to his personal email on his way out the door at CAA; the Open Directing Assignment and Open Casting Assignment ‘grids’ that Employee-1 obtained from CAA in August 2020; the client “rundowns” that Sullivan sent to himself in August 2020; the highly confidential watermarked meeting information that Cooper’s assistant emailed to her personal email account and then to her Range account and/or uploaded to Dropbox; certain confidential or watermarked scripts, and the highly confidential information [Bugliari’s assistant] Wandling received from Employee-1 via Telegram and email. A preliminary list of these trade secret materials is attached as Appendix A. All of these documents contain nonpublic confidential information, gathered at significant expense from countless agents, executives, and employees in various roles at CAA. These materials, often watermarked because of their sensitivity, are not distributed to those outside the company and CAA takes additional measures to keep that information within CAA for the benefit of CAA.
Frustratingly, the last line of this juicy footnote is redacted.
Monday’s filing adds two new claims, with a Violation of California Uniform Trade Secrets Act and Violations of California Penal Code Section 502(c) now in the mix for the various unspecified damages over $25,000 that CAA is seeking along with injunctive relief that essentially is intended to bring death by defenestration to the currently expanding Range.
Like when CAA’s suit was first filed last year, representatives from Range did not respond to Deadline’s request for comment on the latest filing.
This legal action is separate from the closed-door arbitration over equity going on simultaneously between the players here. CAA’s main outside attorney had even more to say than what was in its filing Monday.
“As CAA’s new complaint details: for months when they knew they were leaving CAA, multiple Range founders stole valuable information from CAA,” Bo Pearl told Deadline today. “They took the hard work of CAA colleagues to accelerate Range and lure clients, all while being paid by CAA,” the Paul Hastings partner added. “Despite Range’s many attempts to rewrite history and the hubris to believe that laws don’t apply to it, the evidence of Range’s wrongdoing is crystal clear. Recently recovered emails, messages, photos, and videos reveal the depths of the deception. The Range founders’ public pronouncements of righteousness and innocence are undercut by their every action, which will be laid bare in court.”
That sounds like some serious smokin’ in the boys room.
The post CAA Says It’s Got Range On Camera In Trade-Secrets Theft & Talent-Poaching Suit; Uberagency Claims Rival Was “Fully Aware Of The Legal Risk” appeared first on Deadline.
