A Manhattan woman says People magazine owes her $4 million for mistakenly identifying her as Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s reported mistress in a September 2013 article about the affair.
Entrepreneur Nathalie de Clercq, says in her Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit, that the article, headlined, “Billion-Dollar Breakup?” hit the newsstands just as she was launching an online venture.
“She’s been having trouble getting financing and getting her business on a good footing because she has to deal with this question mark,” De Clercq’s attorney, Jeffrey M. Eilender, told The Post.
“Either she’s a laughingstock or they think she’s a mistress,” he said.
The story reported that Brin, 40, and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, 40, split amid rumors that he had been seeing Google staffer Amanda Rosenberg, 27, on the sly.
The Wiplabs Designs owner has no relationship with Brin or his alleged mistress, the much younger Rosenberg, her defamation suit says.
Their only connection?
Both women “are Eurasian and have long dark hair,” De Clercq, 30, says in her Manhattan civil suit.
Oh and De Clercq owns a pair of Google Glass, an accessory also favored by Rosenberg.
A photographer, working for Corbis Corporation and Splash News, shot De Clercq in her futuristic Google specs while she was innocently bicycling in New York last summer.
De Clercq says in court papers that she was unaware she was being photographed.
She faults People, “one of the most widely circulated…periodicals in the world” for acting in “a grossly irresponsible manner without due consideration for the standards of information gathering.”
Eilender did credit the magazine for removing the photo and printing a retraction.
But he said that the slip-up “horrified” his client and has “transformed’ her life. Where once she was once a successful tech CEO, she is now a “persona non grata” who is “shunned in her professional circles,” according to the court documents.
People should fully correct the error by coughing up the seven-figure payout, Eilender said.
A representative for Time Inc., which owns People, declined to comment, on the pending litigation.