CAA has settled a lawsuit with a writer who had accused the agency of breaching its duty by placing him on blacklists.
Lawyers for the writer, John Musero, informed the court on Monday of a deal to resolve the case ahead of a trial set to start with opening statements this week. The agreement is conditioned on the completion of certain terms within 45 days. CAA will pay roughly $500,000 in the settlement, according to a source. Musero sought $25 million. Further details weren’t disclosed.
“We are glad to finally move on from this meritless lawsuit, which produced no finding of wrongdoing by CAA and was resolved for what amounts to nuisance value,” a spokesperson for CAA tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Expected witnesses at the trial included Aaron Sorkin, who Musero worked with as a scribe on The Newsroom, and Peter Micelli, who ran CAA’s television department at the time but now runs Range Media Partners.
The long-running case started in 2019 when Musero claimed that CAA and his former agent Andrew Miller sabotaged his career by failing to properly shop his pilot called Main Justice. In his telling, the idea attracted the interest of The Mark Gordon Company, the then-largest studio-producer of network TV. But once he entered into a 14-month development deal, CAA entirely stopped submitting Musero for writing opportunities, the lawsuit said. According to the complaint, Miller later redeveloped the script with Top Gun producer Jerry Bruckheimer and writer Sascha Penn, his friend and client who sold it to CBS, while letting Musero’s option with The Mark Gordon Company lapse.
The court last year narrowed the scope of the case, finding that the idea for Musero’s script wasn’t stolen. The trial was set to examine an agency’s duty to a client through the lens of two internal CAA lists of clients. One branded Musero an “underperformer,” while the other designated him a client his agent was “getting rid of.” These so-called blacklists were circulated in 2016 to the head of TV staffing and other department heads within CAA for nearly a year and were accessible through the agency’s internal network, according to court filings. Musero, who had an active writing job at the time, didn’t know about the lists, let alone that he was on it.
CAA claimed that the lists were only seen by four TV department heads and weren’t available to other agents.
The creation and utilization of the lists were disputed, with much of the information remaining behind closed doors. By CAA’s thinking, the lists were only used to identify writers who needed extra attention rather than to determine who to let go. “It’s not a breach to conduct internal reviews of clients’ productivity,” CAA said in a court filing.
Among the questions that was to be asked at trial: Does CAA maintain policies to protect writers from the reputational fallout likely to result from being placed on these lists and, if not, does that constitute a breach of fiduciary duty? Musero said that evidence in the trial would show that the lists signaled to other agents that he was disfavored and shouldn’t be submitted for work opportunities. And by placing him on the lists, the writer argued that Miller was actively working against his own interests. If he had known, he said he would’ve sought other representation.