A model who’s appeared on the TV show “Gossip Girls” says a major international jeweler took advantage of her naïveté by paying her peanuts for a national ad campaign, according to a new lawsuit.
Queens resident Stella Velon, who’s also done commercials for Calvin Klein and Lacoste, says she was paid only $400 cash for what she thought was a test or spec photo shoot for Di Modolo jewelry.
After the September 2011 shoot the petite brunette was shocked to learn from friends who had seen her image plastered on billboards along the New Jersey Turnpike that she’d become the face of Di Modolo’s “Linked By Love” line.
In the $720,000 Manhattan civil suit Velon acknowledges having signed a contract but calls it a “bogus,” one-sentence release.
“This was a busy period for Ms. Velon, who is not a lawyer or a sophisticated businessperson and who was, moreover, accustomed to an industry course of dealing where, if she was to be paid for an ad campaign, she would be given such payment formally in the name of the company at issue rather than being handed some cash by a photographer,” she gripes in the suit.
The ad, featuring the stunning young woman in a plunging neckline adorned with Di Modolo baubles, spread to billboards in Miami, placards in the US Virgin Islands and New York City kiosks.
Recently Bloomingdale’s picked up the sexy spot.
Velon claims the unauthorized usage damages both her career as an aspiring actress because models aren’t taken seriously in the industry, and her future on the runway because her association with the jeweler and Bloomingdale’s will bar her from contracts with competitors.
“It has been humiliating and traumatizing for Ms. Velon to be confronted by friends, acquaintances and strangers who have recognized her from the Di Modolo and Bloomingdale’s ads and assumed she has been lucratively compensated for these major ad campaigns in the manner in which one in the industry would normally be compensated for them,” the suit says.
Velon is suing her PR firm Ana Martins, Di Modolo and Bloomingdale’s. She wants “reasonable compensation” for the shots.
A Di Modolo exec told The Post, “I feel very sorry for her,” but blamed her publicist, Ana Martins PR & Showroom, for stiffing Velon. “We never dealt with Stella directly. We only hired her PR firm. This has nothing to do with us whatsoever.”
A rep for the PR firm said she has not received a copy of the lawsuit and declined to comment.
A spokeswoman for Bloomingdale’s cited company policy not to comment on litigation.