UPDATE: Timothy Hutton sues after being cut from Leverage: Redemption series
The suit comes after producers let the actor—who played Nathan Ford in the original series—go following a sexual assault allegation
Aux News Hutton
Timothy Hutton is suing the producers of the IMDb TV series Leverage: Redemption. According to Variety, the Oscar-winning actor alleges that his contract was breached when he was dropped from the show after a sexual assault allegation was levied against him in a report.
In the report published in March 2020, Buzzfeed News wrote that a woman came forward to the Vancouver Police Department, alleging Hutton raped her in 1983 when she was 14. The woman, Sera Johnston, said she and her friends were invited back to Hutton’s hotel, where the actor allegedly assaulted her. Hutton denied the allegations, saying they were “patently false and designed only to extort money from him.” British Columbia prosecutors did not press charges against the actor.
When Buzzfeed News piece was released, Leverage: Redemption had been picked up as a revival of the five-season TNT show Leverage, and Hutton was preparing to reprise his role as Nathan Ford. After the allegations came to light, however, the production company, Electric Entertainment, cut him from the rebooted series. Ultimately, Hutton was replaced by Noah Wyle.
Hutton alleges that Electric Entertainment failed to investigate the sexual assault allegation and ignored evidence that Hutton’s representatives showed which challenged the claim, per Variety. The suit also alleges that Electric Entertainment violated Hutton’s pay-or-play provision in his contract and that the production company owes him about $3 million.
An oral agreement had been made with Hutton’s representatives where he would have been paid $175,000 per episode, with the addition of directing at least one episode per season, according to the suit. The contract reportedly lacks “morals clause.”
In a statement, Electric Entertainment said that though it hasn’t been serve just yet, Hutton’s suit is “without merit.”
“We take allegations of sexual assault very seriously, especially when children are involved. Despite dealing with these allegations for years, Mr. Hutton failed to disclose them to us before or during negotiations for him to reprise his role in Leverage: Redemption,” the company told Deadline. “Consequently, once we learned of the allegations in the press, we ceased negotiations with him and chose to move on without him. His baseless allegations against us are without merit and we intend to vigorously defend ourselves.”
Update, 3/1: In a statement to The A.V. Club, Dale Kinsella from Hutton’s legal team wrote, “This was a flagrant and pretextual breach of an agreement that had been done for weeks before Electric Entertainment decided there was no deal. Worse, Electric made this decision without any investigation whatsoever. While nobody relishes the prospect of litigation, this course of action is a last resort to hold Electric Entertainment to its obligations. We look forward to presenting our claims to a jury and are confident it will reject Electric’s purported reliance on unsubstantiated and frivolous charges.”
56 Comments
I can only assume that he filed this lawsuit instead of hiring a team of ex-cons to infiltrate the production company, hack its computer system, and release all the details of the negotiation. The latter only makes for better-than-average TV.
G. Gordon Liddy was busy?
(being dead…I know…please don’t line up to reply that he’s dead. I know. No knowledge to be kicked here.)
You know, Liddy was a mean enough S.O.B. to pull off one more caper postmortem.
point.
My friend describes it as a genre of tv she calls “competence porn”. It’s the appeal of the heist movie – watch people do certain things well.
Leverage is also REALLY funny. It’s no shock Aldis Hodge eventually broke out into a star in his own right.
I’ve only seen one episode, but it seemed to be basically ‘Mission: Impossible’ only with criminals instead of spies.
Yeah, I’ve always described it as a light-hearted Mission Impossible, and that is an endorsement.
Yes, but more. The characters are the best at what they do – ridiculously so – but they are also all damaged in some way. And coming together as a team is a way for them to heal and grow. Plus it’s funnier. Of course, if you don’t like the Mission: Impossible stuff, you’ll probably not like it. But give the original a few episodes. The new show is good, but missing some of the magic. I think mostly because Aldis Hodge isn’t there.
I loved the original and was excited about the reboot even without him. I think they could have found someone other than Noah Wyle since he had been in the Librarians and the alien invasion series, but eh.Then I watched the reboot and like you said, the spark wasn’t there. Having Hodge leave but his niece takes over just sort of killed the vibe off. I didn’t even finish the first season.Edit about one more thing.If you watch the bloopers from the original, there’s a scene where Hutton is with Gina Bellman and he grabs her boob. She calls him on it and he doesn’t seem to be to put out about the grab. Based on that, there might be some truth to the allegation from the woman.
I couldn’t finish the remake season either. The first show was pretty corny but the remake just escalates it so much it’s ridiculous. Noah Wylie is so boring that he just talks and puts 4 security guards to sleep? What?I also think they toned down some of the characters too much, but that might be me just missing Hodge.
Good grief…. let’s maybe not pass judgment on his guilt based off of a fucking blooper reel. That’s one of the dumbest fucking things I’ve ever heard. He may very well be guilty, but let’s not pretend like a clip that was willingly included on the bloopers is indicative of being a sexual criminal. Let’s maybe try thinking critically for 2 seconds before posting.
The “damaged people with questionable pasts come together as a team to make right” angle doesnt actually sound like “more,” or make it somehow seem more original or entertaining. That’s incredibly cliched.
While it was on the air, I was usually comparing the first series to Hu$tle, a very similar show that focuses specifically on a team of long-con artists based in London. I always found that show to be slightly more clever than Leverage, because the team almost never relied on stunts or fisticuffs to make their plans work — it was always a con at bottom, so it always came down to misdirection and deceit, with the occasional bit of pickpocketing thrown in to get things rolling.(Also, while the Mickey Bricks team always targeted the obnoxious rich just as the Leverage team does, they usually kept the money. Sometimes there was a wrong to be righted or an insult to be avenged, but usually it was just “we have to steal from somebody, so it might as well be assholes.”)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustle_(TV_series)
Knowing that it doesn’t have Aldis Hodge in it basically means I wouldn’t have watched it anyway. He made the show… without his sparkle no amount of “competence porn” will be entertaining enough.
Person of Interest also slots nicely into that category. Pretty much every time you start to think, hey this person is making a really dumb decision, it turns out you don’t know the whole story…
I’d sue for being replaced by Noah Wyle.
Aw, man, he looks like such a nice guy!
That’s what they all say!
The back end folks on The Librarians and Leverage being the same, plus both keeping post-Angel Christian Kane employed, make the Noah Wyle substitution make more sense.
It was no surprise to me at all that they tapped Wyle to replace Hutton. Dean Devlin has a pretty substantial bullpen to draw from. Also, we can’t forget Almost Paradise in Christian Kane’s Devlin Career arc. There’s a second season coming on IMDB soon.
A verbal agreement is a legally binding contract.
It was no surprise to me at all that they tapped Wyle to replace Hutton. Dean Devlin has a pretty substantial bullpen to draw from.If the bullpen is really that substantial, why couldn’t they do better than Wyle?
I’m sure some of it was due to him being available. That said, I think his character was an improvement over the Nate Ford character. The functional alcoholic story line was wearing thin.
Wyle gets all the (Steve) Jobs! Well, the ones not played by Kutcher or Fassbender, at least!
They didn’t just cut him, they killed off his character so he can never return. Done. Over.While backing out on a handshake agreement is poor form, I’m pretty sure it happens all the time in the TV industry. His lawyers even admit there was nothing in writing. I guess if the story had broken a few weeks later, after the paperwork was done, he might have a case. However, he doesn’t have much of a claim with no contract.
This being Leverage, a “Nate was faking his death all along” plotline isn’t exactly out of the question.
Absolutely. See also: Danny Ocean in Ocean’s 8, which was a clear placeholder of “if we can get George to show up next time”.
Good point, but I doubt the lawsuit is going to help bring Nate Ford back from the dead.
Oral contracts in the entertainment industry are remarkably robust when it comes to litigation.
Then he might have a chance at a settlement, but I doubt it would be anything close to what he’s asking for. And that still won’t help his reputation.
If the terms can be proven. It’s going to boil down to each side’s story, as I doubt there are any impartial witnesses available. It’ll be up to a jury if it doesn’t get tossed.
The new season is surprisingly good. Didn’t miss his ass a bit.
So true. I think Wyle is a more than adequate replacement. Ford was probably my least favorite character anyway. The crooks are far more entertaining.
I liked it, but it has lost some sparkle. I think it’s mainly Aldis Hodge’s absence.
That’s fair.
I’ve seen a few eps of the new one – pretty good. And… Nathan Ford was, to me, the weakest character of the crew. They gave him a ton of tragic backstory, plus he was a usually-functioning alcoholic (except when they needed him to be too drunk to function), and the romance between him and Sophie never quite clicked to me.Still – I think writing him out/killing him off was kind of a cheap shot. I suppose the allegations are more than just allegations, but one of these days, with some actor, they won’t be true and that will be a big mess.
Maybe renewing awareness of your sexual assault accusation by filing a lawsuit for an agreement with no paper trail isn’t the wisest thing to do. Of course, the hope might be they’d settle out of court.
If he thinks he was owed $3 million, he’s hoping he can settle for maybe a third of it.
What else does Hutton have going on, that he’d benefit from people forgetting the allegation (not that anyone forgets, anymore)? He’s using the only—ahem—leverage he’s got, in that it’s probably worth something (less than $3million, certainly, but something) to the producers not to have “rape of a 14 year old” be the first thing people think about when they hear about this series.
To be fair, a lot of celebrities seem to be able to get by just keeping their heads down for a year or two without incident.
There’s probably a formula by now. IO=(F*SO*NO)/TTo calculate Internet Outrage, multiply celebrities Fame times the Serious of the Offenses times Number of Offenses, then divide it all by Time.So Aziz Ansari can come back after a brief break and be sorta sorry, then move on. We probably won’t see Kevin Spacey or Cosby again.
Agreed. I think there’s a world of difference between what appears to be an Aziz Ansari really bad date and Kevin Spacey/Bill Cosby-level long-term sexual predation. Ansari’s behavior, while not excusable, is at least understandable. I can’t say the same for Spacey and Cosby.
It would help if people stopped equating Aziz to the likes of Cosby and Spacey. He was able to comeback because his situation is vastly different from theirs.
You’re comparing Cosby to aziz?
Yeah, but it just feels like he’s at an age (early 60s) and a career stage (mostly a character actor at this point) where it would be really easy for people to stop hiring him, even if he didn’t have sexual assault with a minor hanging over his head. An offer to headline the Leverage reboot and direct an episode a season is head and shoulders better than anything else he has going on these days.
It reminds me of a quote about Oscar Wilde (I’m paraphrasing from memory and forgive the language):When accused of being a sodomite, don’t sue when you actually are a sodomite.
I can’t give credence to her story because it was so long ago. It’s he said/she said 100%.
I hate that people just automatically believe the person’s story from almost 40 years ago that sacks a person from their job and with no evidence.
That’s the new thing now. Don’t file a real criminal complaint to get justice. Just put in out in the either to gain money because at this point, that’s ALL you can gain.
An oral agreementI mean, an oral agreement is only worth the paper it’s printed on. So yeah, probably has no merit.
Issue with oral agreements isn’t that they aren’t valid, it’s that it can be hard to prove what the terms were.
I hope he gets his money,.Slandering someone’s reputation after 20 yrs when it’s impossible to check it one way or the other is ridiculous and should have dire consequences for the accuser’s if they cannot proove,.I mean how many other opportunities and monies has it cost him?
I don’t believe anyone knows what that series is, so it seems likely the case will be thrown out on that basis.
I love Leverage, so you are mistaken.Too bad you didn’t say “no one knows what that series is” because I am definitely “no one”.
Except for all the people who have commented on it.
An allegation, no charges, yet he’s off the show he starred as the lead. Seems like the Court of Public Opinion struck again. I miss Nate Ford, but I miss Alec Hardison even more so. With the exception of the return of Jack Hurley (who doesn’t love Drew Powell?), the new show has been kinda meh.
There’s another update to this story, of sorts: the Portland Mercury published an article about sexual harassment on the sets of Leverage and The Librarians; Christian Kane is the one implicated in most of this, but Hutton is also accused as well. https://www.portlandmercury.com/film/2022/03/01/38778177/silence-on-the-set-claims-of-harassment-and-assault-within-portlands-film-community