Annie Leibovitz Looking Like a Deadbeat
This past summer we asked if famed photographer Annie Leibovitz was a deadbeat. Now we have an answer. She owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills, two lawsuits claim.
The supposed amount is $778,000, for six on-set stylist appointments (which total a staggering two thirds of that big number) that we already knew about, in addition to some $220,000 in unpaid equipment rental bills. Equipment that she got on a discount by promising repeat business, which never materialized.
Back in August a spokesperson for Vanity Fair, for which Leibovitz does frequent work, told the New York Post's Page Six that "all of these [debts] have been resolved." Though, um, clearly the stylist bills haven't if there's still a lawsuit pending.
Since the legal ballyhoo concerns the shoot for Disneyland ads, it's not VF editor Graydon Carter's problem, but it's not exactly a good thing for Leibovitz—loved and respected, resented and back-lashed—to be earning a no-good, deadbeat rep when business seems as precarious as ever.
Though she's paid handsomely ($2 mill/year) for her consistently newsy (King Kong LeBron! Naked Miley! Tina Fey!) VF work, there's been a stream of reports about the portraitist facing some financial straits. In addition to her cute little pair of lawsuits, she reportedly took out a $5 million mortgage on her Greenwich Village home earlier this fall. If the financial downturn affects even our most populist and wealthy of mainstream artistes, what hope is there for the rest of us?