AS former Mets star Lenny Dykstra prepares to participate tonight in a panel about how athletes and coaches apply lessons from the field to achieve success in business, a legal battle with a publishing company is telling a different story.
A number of freelancers for Dykstra’s magazine, The Players Club, claim that they have not been paid for articles they wrote for the second and third issues of the magazine, which is at the center of a legal tussle between magazine publisher Doubledown Media and Dykstra.
For those keeping track, the first issue of The Players Club came out in early April, complete with a $400,000 launch party and a ton of favorable publicity about a magazine that was distributed for free and aimed at providing pro athletes with financial advice. Even The New Yorker wrote a glowing profile on Dykstra as an eccentric but well-meaning and successful entrepreneur.
But issues No. 2 and 3 have been a source of heated disputes that have left freelancers unpaid as Doubledown and Dykstra wage a nasty legal feud over whether Dykstra was ripped off by Doubledown, as he claims, or whether the former baseball great stole the second issue of the magazine from Doubledown, as the publisher claims.
It will all be fought in a federal courtroom in Los Angeles.
An e-mail penned by the assistant to Doubledown Media Editor-in-Chief Randall Lane to all freelancers recently gave the writers the bad news.
“With respect to the second issue of The Players Club, Doubledown did not print the second issue of The Players Club. Nevertheless, we will work diligently with Lenny Dykstra and [Dykstra’s company] TPC Operations to assure that our writers who wrote for that issue are paid in full.”
Nevertheless, the freelancers remain worried.
“Even if something does happen in our favor, it won’t happen for some time,” said Chris Lewis, a golfing writer who said he’s owed $1,400 for articles he wrote in the second and third issues.
Said another writer, “Suffice it to say there are a lot of disgrun tled freelancers.”
Doubledown said it mailed checks to everyone involved in the first issue of the magazine. However, checks weren’t mailed to freelancers who wrote for the second issue, which Dykstra had printed on his own by another printer, Trend Offset Printer. The third issue is slated to go to press shortly.
This latest chapter in the Dykstra-Doubledown imbroglio happens as Dykstra is slated to be part of a “Newsmaker Event Panel” sponsored by Thomson Reuters to “examine how more and more athletes and coaches are using the lessons learned from the playing field and in the locker room, including teamwork, self-discipline, work ethic, leadership and character building to score success in business.”
Dykstra had better hope neither Doubledown Media nor the freelance writers who contributed to his Players Club magazine show up in the audience.
A second casualty in the mess is a financial advice newsletter named The Dykstra Report that will never be published.
Doubledown last week was reluctantly offering to refund $70,000 in subscriber payments it collected for the newsletter, which Dykstra claims uses his name without his permission.
The publisher asserts he did give permission and has produced e-mails in its court filings to back up its claims.
Meanwhile, there have been developments on the legal front as well.
In an amended countersuit, Doubledown claims the second issue was stolen by Dykstra, who the company claims used copyrighted material put together by Doubledown staffers and freelancers without permission.
Last week, Dykstra dropped his original law firm Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis and hired famous LA attorney Dan Petrocelli to represent him.
And even Petrocelli said it was a priority to pay the freelancers.
“Everybody should get paid and will get paid once we figure out where all the money went that Lenny gave them,” he said.
Bruce Ewing, an attorney for Doubledown Media said “Dykstra and his company took the issue, printed it without authorization, and now seem to expect other people to pay for it. We’re going after them to get everyone involved paid in full.”
Selfless act
Lucy Danziger, editor-in-chief of Self, is going to be checking into an episode of the ABC soap “All My Children” to play a version of herself, an editor of a woman’s beauty magazine.
The soap has actually inspired a real-life spin-off of beauty products called Fusion, which on the TV show is run by Greenlee Smythe, played by actress Rebecca Budig.
In the show, Danziger goes to the Fusion offices as part of a plot line involving the characters working at the beauty company.
Danziger’s episode, which filmed last Thursday, airs on June 23 – right around the time that the July issue of Self hits newsstands.
In that issue, two actresses from the soap, Budig and Alicia Minshew, review long-lasting lipsticks.
A TV appearance isn’t interfering with Danziger’s day job, however.
Last week, she swooped down on Us Weekly to snatch up Senior Editor Jennifer O’Neill to be the new senior fitness editor at Self.
Sources inside Wenner Media, which publishes Us Weekly, said owner Jann Wenner “is going nuts on the budgets” – prompting some longtime staffers to look for jobs elsewhere.