Producers Sue Valerie Harper for $20 Million

As if the Valerie Harper/Lorimar divorce wasn’t messy enough, the executive producers of “Valerie” have filed a $20-million libel and slander suit against their former star.

Thomas Miller and Robert Boyett, executive producers of both “Valerie” and its current incarnation, “Valerie’s Family,” claim in a suit filed Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court that, in nationally broadcast television shows, Harper falsely accused them of lying and perjury.

Harper left the NBC series at the end of last season after contract negotiations broke down with Lorimar Telepictures, the show’s production company. Lorimar, Miller and Boyett have all said that Harper willingly walked off the series, and Lorimar has a suit pending against her for breach of contract.

Harper has her own suit against Lorimar alleging that she was wrongly fired from the show. A trial on Harper’s case has been tentatively scheduled for April 20.

Miller and Boyett’s new suit alleges that in an interview on the “Regis Philbin Morning Show” on WABC-TV in New York last October, Harper said the producers “robbed me of my show. And to compound it, they lied publicly and constantly to the papers and to the news, saying I left, that I couldn’t work out the money.”

The suit also charges that on the nationally broadcast CNN program “Larry King Live,” which aired last December, Harper said she “really felt stabbed in the back” by her “two partners. My friends, alleged friends, wrote declarations and literally perjured themselves about my behavior.”

The libel suit states that Harper’s remarks were false and that she “maliciously” made those statements to “defame and discredit” Miller and Boyett.