Celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz‘s finances are still far from picture-perfect. The Vanity Fair shooter was slapped with another big-bucks lawsuit yesterday, just weeks after she reached an agreement with a private investment firm to save her priceless work.
In papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, Brunswick Capital Partners said it helped Leibovitz land her recent $40 million deal with Colony Capital — and claimed she now owes Brunswick up to $800,000 in fees, The Post’s Dareh Gregorian reports.
Brunswick said it made “exhaustive efforts to seek strategic financing” for Leibovitz to reduce her debt late last year, and referred her to Colony.
While she paid Brunswick its initial $50,000 retainer fee, the suits claims she hasn’t made good on an agreement to pay a 2 percent post-deal “success fee.” Brunswick says Leibovitz was due to pay in $10,000-a-week installments, but has yet to pay a dime. The suit says she owes the firm $315,000, including interest.
Leibovitz — famed for images of a pregnant Demi Moore and a naked John Lennon wrapped around Yoko Ono — had been in danger of losing three Greenwich Village townhouses and her entire portfolio after she fell behind on a $24 million debt to another lending firm, Art Capital.
But in an 11th-hour deal, Colony repaid Art Capital and vowed to work with Leibovitz “to enhance the value” of her “magnificent body of work” — some 100,000 images and 1 million negatives.
But a source familiar with the dispute claimed to us that Colony “knows nothing” of Brunswick, which had “nothing to do with their deal. They only provided Annie with a list of options.” The source added, “This is someone trying to derail her when things are at last going well.” Leibovitz declined to comment.