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Man Fires Off "Apprentice" Suit
The Apprentice is moving from the boardroom to the courtroom.
A California man has filed his second lawsuit against producers of the Donald Trump-fronted NBC hit, alleging they stole his idea for an Apprentice-like show called C.E.O.
Mark Bethea, who sued Trump, reality kingpin Mark Burnett and NBC Universal in federal court last year for supposedly ripping off his pitch, made a similar claim in state court on Monday, this time naming only Burnett and his partner, Conrad Riggs.
Per his Los Angeles Superior Court complaint, Bethea says he registered his concept for C.E.O., complete with Trump as host, with the Writers Guild of America in August 2000. A year later, he and Velocity Entertainment Group approached Burnett.
"In the summer of 2001, he pitched his original idea to defendants?[who] stole Bethea's expression of thought and called it The Apprentice," the suit states.
Burnett, responding to the federal lawsuit last year, says he came up with the idea for the Trump vehicle while shooting Survivor in the Amazon in late 2002.
But Bethea, who resides in the L.A. suburb of Marina del Rey, says that is bunk. "The number of similarities between C.E.O. and The Apprentice is impossible to attribute to sheer coincidence," he says in his suit.
He and Velocity Entertainment Group are seeking monetary damages to cover the alleged Apprentice-jacking, as well as cover past, present and future economic losses.
Bethea could not immediately be reached to comment on why he filed the second action and only named Burnett and Riggs as defendants. His initial lawsuit, filed U.S. District Court in Los Angeles in September is still pending.
NBC referred all calls to Burnett's production company, which did not immediately comment on the litigation.
The British-born producer is keeping his lawyers busy. He and Trump dodged the bullet in another Apprentice-related lawsuit earlier this month.
A disabled St. Louis attorney settled his suit against Burnett and Trump after they agreed to change wording on The Apprentice application so that wheelchair-bound wannabes were encouraged to try out for the show.
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