A former friend and business associate of actor Terry Crews has filed a $1 million lawsuit claiming the 50-year-old "cyberstalked" and harassed him.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Crews unloaded a series of tweets last year alerting fans to a former friend squatting on an old and defunct website of the actor's from 1999. The site and the PecPop Player app were designed in part by Darwin Hall, the plaintiff who filed the lawsuit against the Brooklyn Nine-Nine star. Crews alleges his former friend was using his domain name to build porn sites.
The former friend squatting on my domain name https://t.co/7GGWGKPEMP has decided-because of r/CrewsCrew pressure-to offer a settlement of 30% of the original 1 million dollars he wanted.
So $300,000 will get my domain back.
Merry Christmas
— terrycrews (@terrycrews) December 25, 2017
Hall's Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based company Symbolic Web Media, LLC was contracted early in Crews' career when he was a football player and just beginning to get into acting. Crews' thread from December 2017 alleges Hall — who isn't mentioned by name — tried to strongarm Crews into $1 million for unpaid wages.
“This Complaint is brought by Plaintiff Darwin Hall seeking payment for services rendered and costs incurred by Plaintiff in connection with his services to Defendants, and for Defendants’ tortious acts in response,” the lawsuit states. “As a direct and proximate result of Defendants’ breach of the agreements, Plaintiffs have suffered damages in an amount to be proven at trial, and exceeding $1,000,000.”
The Deadpool 2 actor agreed to pay Hall $55 per hour, but Hall claims he was only paid $28,479.06 over the duration of their working relationship from 1999 to 2017. That amount is for only 296 hours of work of the estimated 6,000 hours performed, reports Deadline. Hall said he helped bolster Crews' social media presence in that time, as well.
Their relationship began to sour in 2013 when Hall alleged Crews did not want to work with an LGBT-identifying client on a “dating app that the client had created for professional women,” Hall said. However, Crews refuted such claims in the 2017 tweetstorm claiming the app was porn.
When I found out he was building porn sites, I told him I couldn’t work with him anymore, I saw how it all would backfire on me. He agreed to no longer build them…
Then promptly asked ME to pay him to replace all the money the porn sites would have given him.
I refused.
— terrycrews (@terrycrews) December 25, 2017
Both men have yet to agree to reconcile the unpaid wages. In addition to the million dollars, Hall is also demanding all posts related to the dispute be deleted from social media.
“Further, in response, to the demand for payment, Defendants engaged in a horrific campaign of harassment and cyberbullying that has caused Plaintiff to fear for his life and suffer substantial emotional distress, all because he dared to ask Defendants to honor their end of the bargain,” the complaint read.
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