LOS ANGELES — The second day of the second set of hearings concerning the Labor Board petition filed on behalf of five former models against agent Derek Hay and LA Direct took place today in downtown Los Angeles.
After the petitioners presented their case during the first set of hearings in late September, and their attorney Allan Gelbard rested their case at the end of cross-examinations yesterday, it was time for Hay’s defense to present the respondent’s case-in-chief.
The day began with over an hour of evidentiary disputes between Gelbard and Hay’s attorney, Richard D. Freeman. Freeman eventually called one of the petitioners, Shay Evans, as his first witness.
Evans, who had testified in September that she only had one sexual encounter with Hay, in November 2016, was asked by Freeman if she had been intimate with her then-agent at other times. Evans denied this.
The next line of questioning concerned Evans’ claim that after she rebuffed Hay’s advances during a trip to Hawaii in the Spring of 2017, the agent had retaliated by withholding work from her. Evans had previously agreed that she had performed several feature dance engagements after the Hawaii incident, but she claimed that those engagements had been contracted earlier that year.
The dancing engagements were booked through the Lee Network, another of Hay’s companies.
Freeman attempted to introduce 11 contracts supposedly signed by Evans after the Hawaii trip, but after about 45 minutes of confusion organizing the papers and delivering them one-by-one by the attorney to the witness, walking around three large conference tables, the matter of Evans’ Lee Network contracts was first tabled and the contracts were not entered into evidence.
Hay’s defense still managed to establish that Evans had booked 11 engagements through the agent’s feature dance company between May 2017 and October 2018, though the matter of when those contracts were signed by Evans still seemed unclear by the end of the day.
Freeman then started questioning Evans about a shoot she did with producer Pierre Woodman in June 2017, also after the Hawaii trip. The lawyer asked Evans about a tweet she posted at the time claiming she “had so much fun doing her first anal” with Woodman.
“Did you tweet that?” asked Freeman.
“Yes — I’m a brand, so I wanna be in the public eye,” Evans explained about the apparent discrepancy between the tweet and earlier testimony.
“I’m a persona,” she added.
Before the hearing broke for lunch, Freeman also grilled Evans about other shoots she had booked during her contract with LA Direct and about “going on tour” in Washington, D.C. and New York for lucrative escorting engagements during her time when Hay could have booked her for video work in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Freeman attempted to discredit Evans’ testimony about a private “karaoke party” that Hay had booked for some of his talent in November 2017, which she characterized as a dangerous, out-of-control event full of “drunken men,” “groping” and with “no security.”
Hay’s attorney asked Evans about feature dance engagements at the Crazy Horse gentlemen's club and also about a “suite party” during a convention in Vegas, implying that Evans was no stranger to rowdy events.
Evans retorted that she generally felt safe in those two scenarios but she did not at the LA Direct-booked “karaoke party.”
“At a club there are rules,” said Evans. “It’s a business. This is a party with a bunch of drunk people and it’s not regulated.”
Cross-examined by her own attorney, Evans told Gelbard that the feature dance engagements were not proof that Hay had not retaliated for the Hawaii incident because she “never wanted to feature dance” and had only been pressured into it by her agent “after many months of me telling him I didn’t want to do it.”
Evans also told Gelbard that when she had brought up her discomfort at the “karaoke party,” Hay via phone had “belittled” and “bullied” her.
“I felt as if he was telling me that I wasn’t allowed to have the feeling about that party,” she testified.
After lunch, Freeman confronted Evans with a number of scenes she had performed since February 2019, after she had changed her stage name. Freeman established that Evans believes that she did not need to obtain a formal release from Hay’s contract to secure more work because, in her opinion, Hay had ceased attempting to get her video work after July 2018. “Either party can void the contract if I didn’t get work in four months,” Evans stated.
The second witness called by Freeman as part of his case-in-chief was Chris Fleming, an unlicensed agent who works for Hay and handles some of the talent, including matters related to most of the petitioners, for LA Direct.
Fleming testified he started working for Hay around 2012 in Los Angeles, and was with the agency when most of the operations were moved to Hay’s home office in Las Vegas, around 2013-2014.
According to Fleming’s testimony, he had most dealings with petitioners Sofi Ryan and Andi Rye, handled some contractual matters for Hadley Viscara and Shay Evans, and had almost no dealings with Charlotte Cross.
Freeman questioned Fleming in detail about Ryan’s contract in particular and about LA Direct’s contracts in general. Fleming explained that signing a model involved six different set of documents: the Model Profile, the Representation Agreement, the Best Practices & Rules of Conduct, the 2257 Sheet, the Authorization to Release Health Information and the Model Release (Photo Release).
Fleming was also asked about his agent-model experiences with Andi Rye, the petitioner with whom he had worked most closely.
Much of the interrogation, and Gelbard’s cross-examination, had to do with whether the documents were presented to the models as a single bundle. Fleming insisted that he laid down all the documents “on a table or on the floor” separately, going over them with every model one-by-one.
Fleming repeatedly referred to his “10 years in the industry,” and his familiarity with “industry practices” and “things everybody in the industry knows,” which prompted repeated objections from Gelbard, often based on Fleming’s lack of formal training and his lack of state license.
Fleming also denied any specific knowledge of Hay’s, or LA Direct’s models’, dealings with escorting services.
Gelbard also pressed Hay’s employee on the corporate structure of LA Direct, which sometimes operates under the name “Direct Models Las Vegas,” but Fleming claimed he was not familiar with that aspect of the business.
When asked by Freeman and Special Officer Salazar, who presides over the hearings, about the relevance of this line of questioning, Gelbard mentioned that he is laying down statements on the record in preparation for a potential “trial de novo.”
The trial de novo is a less informal litigation option that could be pursued in the event the conflict between Hay and his former clients is not resolved at the end of these hearings.
The hearings will resume tomorrow morning in downtown Los Angeles.
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