She Put the Cunt in Cunt-tract
Years ago, I represented a woman who shall remain nameless, but let’s just say she is a horrible designer (while I make it a rule to only represent people I believe in, I’d hired an employee who brought along some of her own clients, the PR equivalent of bedbugs). When we stopped working together, she left an unpaid retainer of $35,000. There was no point in suing this woman for the $35,000 she owed me, because by this time I already knew how the system worked. If I dragged her to court, I’d owe $75,000 in lawyers’ fees. So I held on to her ugly collection instead, hoping this might convince her to pay her bill. When she called me up wanting it back, I said, “Go fuck yourself. Pay me bitch.”
She called the police. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a clause in our People’s Revolution contracts back then giving us the right to keep designers’ samples until they paid their bill (now we do). So the police came to my office and confiscated the property; in their view, the unpaid $35,000 was a separate issue that had to be resolved in court.
I thought this was the end of the episode, and I was prepared to write off the money as a cost of doing business, literally so I’d never have to see this woman’s terrifying face again. Little did I know she was only getting started. One day, I was sitting at my desk at the office when I heard a knock at the door. In walked a uniformed official bearing a yellow legal notice.
“Kelly Cutrone?” he asked. “You have been served.”
If you haven’t had the pleasure, let me explain: Being served means the state dispatches someone to physically hand you legal papers and confirm you have them in your possession—this typically happens in a divorce. But I wasn’t being served divorce papers. My former client was suing me for stealing a portion of her collection which she valued at one million dollars. At first, I couldn’t believe it. I mean, this was preposterous! Who did this bitch think that she was?
I went to court to give a deposition. A deposition is when the town crier’s lawyers ask you whatever the fuck they want to. In fact, their job is to help you have a breakdown, so you look like a crazy person and their client (the real crazy person) looks good.
“Have you ever lied?” they might ask.
“Have you ever fired staff in front of other staff?
“Have you ever lost anything belonging to your clients?”
“Can you say with absolute certainty in your business that you have always painstakingly known where everything was?”
Lawyers don’t care about the truth; they just want to win, and bill as many hours as possible. As the months went by, I was forced to appear in court again and again to file motions, and my own legal bills started to pile up: $10,000, then $20,000, then $40,000, then $60,000. On top of this, I was bringing in less money, because I was wasting my time in court instead of pitching new clients. At one point, my lawyer suggested I cut my losses and settle for $200,000. By this point I knew I was the losing person at the gambling table, but I would have sooner gone down on a burning ship than pay this woman shit. This was about principle. I was not about to give up.
On July 5, 2010, four years after being served, I was working with Amma in New York when I had to excuse myself to appear at a mandatory prehearing for the case, which was still dragging on.
“Where are you?” one of Amma’s swamis texted me.
“In court,” I typed. “A client is accusing me of stealing $1 million worth of her collection.”
“Oh, good luck,” he wrote back.
Good luck? I thought. That’s all he has to say? Apparently, even swamis know the law has nothing to do with the truth.
My lawyer was terribly afraid I was going to act like a crackpot in court. In fact, he’d even asked a mutual friend of ours how she was possibly friends with me, since I was by now calling him routinely to shriek obscenities like, “Go fuck yourself! We are not settling! I did not steal anyone’s property! I have had everything taken from me in this industry! It will not take my principles and my liberties too!” He’d asked me please, please not to say anything inappropriate in front of the judge and to make sure I dressed appropriately too.
So I showed up in Donna Karan, with my hair pulled back. I was calm, since I’d been busy meditating all weekend with Amma’s swamis. But the sight of my former client in the hallway, full of lies, put me over the edge.
“Every cent you steal from me is going to rot you,” I hissed, boring my eyes right into her. “It is going to hurt and rot you.”
She looked visibly nervous. At the last hearing, her lawyer had asked mine whether I was involved in witchcraft, since I was making his client physically ill. He demanded I refrain from staring at her.
“If she’s going to accuse me of stealing $1 million from her, you’d better believe I’m going to stare at her the whole fucking time we’re sitting here,” I told my lawyer.
After all, when victims’ families go to court to confront a perpetrator, they stare at the offender the whole time. How was this any different? This woman was trying to murder my business!
I proceeded into the judge’s chambers with my lawyer—the parties go in one at a time to have their side heard—who was trying to calm me down. “She’s a nice judge,” he whispered, “and she likes fashion!” I thought she looked like Ann-Margret.
“Hello, Ms. Cutrone,” she said.
“Hello, Your Honor,” I replied.
“So what is going on here?” she
