Carson Beeps Motorola with Lawsuit

Tue., Sep. 4, 2001 3:25 PM PDT by Josh Grossberg

Carson Daly has dialed up a lawsuit against Motorola after his deal with the cell-phone maker was disconnected.

The Total Request Live host filed suit against Motorola accusing the company of nixing a deal that would have paid Daly a cool $1 million to hawk Motorola-made cell phones, pagers and other products to the MTV generation.

According to the lawsuit filed last Thursday in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, Daly says Motorola backed out of the January agreement because of financial difficulties that forced the corporation to slash its advertising budget.

"[Motorola], motivated by declining earnings and the effect of the same on its advertising budget, reneged on its agreement," states the lawsuit.

Daly claims that by the time the Motorola deal fell through in July, he had lost more than $1 million after rejecting several lucrative offers to do commercials for rival companies.

As for Motorola, the electronics maker says the deal with Daly was never officially done. "A contract with Daly did not exist," says company spokeswoman Julie Cordua, who says the company was only in talks with Daly about becoming a spokesman.

While Cordua declined to elaborate further, she did issue a statement saying the uncertain economy was the reason behind Motorola's decision not to enlist Daly.

"As we've stated since December, Motorola is in the process of reviewing its global operations in order to achieve greater cost-efficiencies within each business and, ultimately, in this environment, we did not feel that the decision to bring Carson on board as a company spokesperson would be the right decision for Motorola," the statement reads.

(Maybe the company should steal Carrot Top away from AT&T--we're guessing he's pretty cheap.)

Daly's camp had little to say except to confirm the $1 million breach-of-contract suit.

"Particularly in light of his prior relationship with Motorola, Carson is disappointed at these recent developments, but under the circumstances, he feels forced to take legal action at this time," Daly's publicist says in a statement.

Even without the Motorola money, Daly's not exactly strapped for cash.

The MTV heartthrob already has got quite a few money-making enterprises going on, including a new gig moonlighting as host of NBC's late-late-night one-on-one interview show, Later. That's in addition to keeping his day job emceeing TRL, as well as deejaying two syndicated music radio shows.

Not bad for a guy who at one time considered joining the priesthood.