Keith Redmon filed a lawsuit against former employer Anonymous Content that challenges his termination last year and claims that the company engaged in a “smear campaign” to tar him with allegations of sexual misconduct.
In the lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday, Redmon is seeking unpaid compensation as well as 25% of Anonymous’ participation in the net profits of the TV series Schitt’s Creek.
In the lawsuit (read it here), Redmon contends that Anonymous “concocted a fabricated basis” for firing him last June “for cause” and then refused to honor his employment agreement and other obligations owed to him. He claims that the company “ultimately resorted to a public smear campaign designed to falsely brand Redmon in the press as a perpetrator of multiple acts of nonconsensual physical sexual misconduct, none of which is true. By its outrageous conduct, current leadership has proven unable even to execute an executive termination plan in a reasonably competent and professional manner.”
Redmon had been with the firm for nearly 20 years when he left. He was one of the producers on the Oscar-nominated The Revenant. News of the lawsuit was first reported in Variety.
In the lawsuit, Redmon claims that he “became a target” of the company’s new leadership under CEO Dawn Olmstead because of open disagreements with them. In the lawsuit, his attorneys write that on June 11, a week after a Zoom call, he was abruptly suspended and “was told that he had done something inappropriate on the Zoom call. When Redmon protested and was able to produce a recording of the Zoom call (which Olmstead was unaware existed when she suspended Redmon), it was clear that he had done nothing wrong, and Anonymous never mentioned the Zoom call again.”
But the lawsuit states that a week later, Redmon was terminated “allegedly ‘for cause,’ because he supposedly yelled too much in the office.” Redmon’s attorneys say that none of the incidents described in her termination letter was documented in her personnel file. “The termination was coupled with a threat that Anonymous would publicly accuse Redmon of sexual misconduct — to be clear, no such misconduct had occurred — unless he accept a fraction of the compensation he was owed and forfeit his equity” in the company.
A spokesperson for the company did not have an immediate comment.