Jessica Biel. Photo courtesy of Entertainment Tonight.
Summary: Staff members at Jessica Biel’s restaurant claim the actress collected tips and never disbursed them to her employees.
Jessica Biel is being accused of stealing from the wait staff at her new restaurant. The actress and wife of Justin Timberlake has an eatery which Eater described as a Soho House for children, and she is now being sued for allegedly collecting hundreds and thousands of dollars in tips but never passing them on to the people who earned them.
Biel and some business partners created the restaurant, Au Fudge, a pricey and exclusive restaurant for parents and their children located in West Hollywood. To eat at the establishment, patrons must obtain a membership, which means this treehouse-like atmosphere is a place where rich kids can play exclusively with other rich kids.
But according to a new lawsuit obtained by The Blast, Au Fudge’s primary revenue stream is private events. At these events, the restaurant automatically adds a generous 22% gratuity, but the lawsuit said that the restaurant and Biel keep the money instead of giving it to the employees.
Former Au Fudge Director of Events Alexandra Desage said that private event customers believed the gratuity was given to the wait staff, which is a custom thing to do to tips in the restaurant industry. Desage added that she also did not believe customers added more tip to the mandatory tip, another common restaurant practice.
Desage said that she told management about this problem, but that she was told, “Don’t worry about it.”
Desage resigned in 2017. Although she is not a plaintiff, AOL said that she is likely related to two of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit who share her last name.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit said that Biel and her parents stole up to $430,000 from them, and they are asking for $1,000,000 in damages. The staff said that they are also owed $31,459 in lost meal breaks.
According to AOL, the plaintiffs are suing Au Fudge, AFI Partners, LP, Jessica Biel, Estee Stanley, Monica Saunders-Weinberg, Jonathan Rollo, Joey Gonzalez, and Kim Muller. The lawsuit was filed on Wednesday in Los Angeles.
The plaintiffs are Christina Desage, Jacqueline Desage, Megan Cournoyer, Jodie Moore, Emily Qualey, Patrick Conor, Kristyn Toney, Josef Gamper and Jack Stagg; and according to the filing, they worked in various front-of-house positions at Au Fudge in 2016.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs said that they were young and unaware that their rights were being violated by Biel and her business partners.
“Plaintiffs were unfamiliar with workers’ rights and were ill-prepared to deal with violations of their rights in the workplace,” the lawsuit said.
Jessica Biel is most famous for her work in Seventh Heaven, and she is appearing this year in the TV series The Sinner. Celebrity Net Worth stated that she is worth $18 million, and she is married to singer Justin Timberlake who reportedly has a fortune of $230 million.