A teen ex-beauty queen is suing Disney and the TV show “Wife Swap” for $100 million — charging that they intentionally ruined her life by making her look like a spoiled brat, exposing her to “ridicule, mockery and derision.”
“For their own profit, defendants purposefully, intentionally and knowingly caused severe emotional and psychological harm to a fragile 15-year-old,” says the Manhattan Supreme Court suit, which also targets ABC and RDF Media.
The show features families swapping mothers.
Alicia Guastafarro, now 18, was so wounded by “incessant verbal and physical assaults from her peers,” the suit says, that the former honor student had to finish high school in a special program.
And while the show claims to be reality, many of its sequences were scripted, the suit alleges.
The former Little Miss Buffalo said she was instructed to pretend to get a “Christmas present” every morning, to angrily return her cereal to her mom and to repeat such lines as “I am the most popular girl in school.”
She adds that penalty clauses in her contract “prohibited and discouraged” her from explaining her behavior and that while her mom, Karen, got $20,000 from the show, she didn’t get a dime.
The show’s producers declined to comment.