The husband of an ex-“Actual Housewife” used her fame to bamboozle a marijuana grower into an funding deal — and despatched the enterprise up in smoke when his private-equity fund didn’t cough up the cash, in accordance with court docket papers.
The fund — Gateway Privileged Fund LLC — is managed by Reid Drescher, husband of RHONY Aviva and cousin of Fran Drescher, star of “The Nanny.”
Reid Drescher claimed to have entry to gobs of money to put money into Los Angeles-based marijuana grower P&S Ventures LLC, in accordance with P&S’s swimsuit, filed Monday in Manhattan Supreme Courtroom.
“Drescher bragged that he was a cousin of Fran Drescher, who performed The Nanny within the tv collection of that identify, and that his spouse, Aviva Drescher, was on Bravo’s Actual Housewives of New York, claiming to have many celeb contacts because of this,” the swimsuit mentioned.
Aviva Drescher — well-known for throwing her prosthetic leg at another housewife onscreen — was cut from the hit show in 2014.
Believing his “quite a few materially false representations,” P&S agreed to simply accept a $5.4 million funding from Drescher’s fund in trade for inventory.
However Reid Drescher was quickly “pressured” to confess that his fund didn’t have the promised cash, the swimsuit mentioned.
The fund had raised simply $1 million of a deliberate $120 million as of 2019, in accordance with its most recent securities filing.
Gateway in the end solely kicked $1.35 million into P&S. The shortfall was “extremely harmful” to P&S, the swimsuit mentioned and drove it right into a “expensive and damaging receivership,” the swimsuit mentioned.
P&S is searching for compensatory and punitive damages, and asking for its contract with Gateway to be canceled. An lawyer for P&S, Matthew Press, declined to remark.
An lawyer representing Drescher and Gateway mentioned P&S’s lawsuit was “a frivolous contract declare.”
“The entity that’s being sued will probably be submitting some very severe counterclaims,” Richard Roth, lawyer for Drescher and Gateway, mentioned in an interview. “We’re going to file an enormous counterclaim right here. We’re going to carry the plaintiffs chargeable for their contractual obligations.”
