Nine months after a mysterious new company bought LA Weekly, one of the company’s owners is suing the rest, alleging they have mismanaged the alternative weekly, pillaged it for their own gain and improperly kicked him out of the management team. David Welch wants to dissolve the company.
Wherein Jeff Weiss and the good people of the Boycott L.A. Weekly movement are proven right:
Calle, the suit says, has been making $120,000 a year as chief marketing officer of Orange County marijuana firm Kurvana even as he retains “full editorial control” of LA Weekly, and has arranged for Kurvana to be promoted in LA Weekly at the paper’s expense. Calle let Kurvana run ads in the Weekly even after racking up a balance due of tens of thousands of dollars, the lawsuit says. Further, it says, LA Weekly ran a “glowing review” of a Kurvana product July 26 without disclosing that Calle is in charge of Kurvana’s marketing.
The suit also says Calle and two fellow LA Weekly owners — Wayne Gross, a litigator from Huntington Beach, and Steve Mehr, an attorney who is CEO of Irvine business development consultancy WebShark360 — funded a company called Vanguard that sells advertisers the opportunity to promote their products via people who are popular on social media. That encroaches on a way LA Weekly has earned money, and they have used LA Weekly staffers “to conduct Vanguard business from the LA Weekly offices” without compensating the company, the suit alleges.
