Not sure if Cavalry Media needs someone to come to the rescue, but the shaky shingle may now see its whole house of alleged cards come tumbling down.
Already trampled by financial ills, big-name exits and lawsuits related to the fatal 2021 shooting on Alec Baldwin’s Rust, the company run by Keegan Rosenberger and Ishan Sakena now faces a dirty-laundry lawsuit from former founder Dana Brunetti.
A year and change after Brunetti, the House of Cards executive producer and ex-Cavalry chief content officer, headed out the door to pursue his own projects (as they always say), he is now suing the company for more than $1 million in “wrongfully” withheld wages and more. Or, as the lawsuit quotes Brunetti declaring to CEO Rosenberger in a tense digital November 13, 2022 exchange in which he learned he wasn’t going to get paid his $750,000-per-year salary: “I’m not going to be rolled over and squeezed.”
“On information and belief, Plaintiff alleges that Defendant Rosenberger and Ishan Saksena raised several million dollars in seed funding for Cavalry Media projects but used that funding for other personal projects instead of using the money to pay Cavalry Media employees, thereby leaving Cavalry Media underfunded including at the time of incorporation,” read the lawsuit alleging breach of contract and other claims filed by the Joseph Farzam Law Firm.
“On information and belief, Plaintiff alleges Defendant Rosenberger and Defendant Saksena used seed funding and other monies paid to Cavalry Media for personal use,” reads the complaint filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Having exited the six-year-old Cavalry in January 2023, Brunetti is now saying the scrawl was on the wall for a while when he was notified by his business manager in September 2022 that he hadn’t been getting paid. As the company stopped paying staffers and vendors and slashed health insurance in quick succession, Rosenberger tried to convince Brunetti he was in the same boat thanks to tight-fisted backers.
Today, calling out Rosenberger and for acting in an allegedly “deliberate, cold, callous, cruel, and intentional manner,” Brunetti is after a wide range of damages. The Fifty Shades of Grey producer says in legalese that he “has suffered and will continue to suffer harm and is entitled to recover, and claims, general damages for emotional and mental distress and aggravation in a sum in excess of the jurisdictional minimum of this Court.”
Cavalry Media was founded in 2018 by Rosenberger and Brunetti with the mission of making moderately priced premium film and TV series for linear and new-media platforms in the $40 million-$80 million range.
However, Deadline learned exclusively a year ago that Cavalry Media’s 14-person staff hadn’t been paid in months, and their benefits, including health, were suspended. Some staffers were told by senior management that their commission monies had been deposited; to receive them, however, they’d have to remove their wage claims.
Some employees were owed as much as $50,000 to $500,000 in back pay and commissions.
Rosenberger reportedly told staff that a big acquisition in the audio space was afoot to right the ship. Insiders told Deadline that of Cavalry’s $14 million seed money, $9 million was spent on development and overhead. The odd part: Coming out of the pandemic, Cavalry didn’t have offices as staffers were working remotely.
At the time of our report, Rosenberger told Deadline. “The company is not in a state of financial distress.”
“We have not been notified of a single wage claim or received anything from third-party counsel,” added Rosenberger, who before Cavalry had headed strategy and corporate development at Relativity Media.
Deadline has come to learn recently that some of the execs who departed with ties to projects at studios were paid half their producing fees by Cavalry.
Brunetti was the first to leave, with Alec Baldwin’s manager Matt Del Piano following, in addition to SVP Development Jason Seagraves.
Cavalry Media has not released any TV series or films during its tenure. In the podcast space, it had Art Fraud, X Marks the Spot: The Legend of Forrest Fenn and the Oscar Isaac-Edgar Castillo podcast The Rosenberg Case. Art Fraud remains in development as a movie at Netflix with a screenplay by Wells Tower. Other series in development include Motorheads at Amazon Studios and The Devil Within at Epix.
Cavalry Media was named as a defendant in various suits relating to the film Rust, but we’re told it was not a producer on the indie Western. The firm was named due to the fact that Baldwin and Rust director Joel Souza were clients of the firm.
