Spelling Seeks to Overturn $5-Million Award to Pregnant Actress

Claiming a “runaway jury” awarded damages so excessive they were “off the charts,” a lawyer for Spelling Television on Tuesday asked a judge to toss out a $5-million verdict won by an actress who convinced jurors that she had been fired from a television show because she was pregnant.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Fumiko Wasserman said she expects to rule next week on Spelling’s request for either a new trial or a sharp reduction in the damages awarded actress Hunter Tylo, who was fired from “Melrose Place” in March 1996.

Jurors had agreed in December that Spelling executives discriminated against Tylo by firing her. She was hired to play a sultry seductress, but the producers immediately fired her upon learning of her pregnancy, according to trial testimony.

The producers claimed that the pregnancy amounted, under Tylo’s contract, to a “material change in her appearance” that made her unsuitable for the role.

“In Hollywood, appearance is everything,” argued Spelling attorney Paul Grossman during a two-hour hearing Tuesday. “If you don’t look the role, you don’t get the role.”

But Tylo’s attorney, Nathan Goldberg, said that Spelling clearly discriminated because it fired his client immediately--long before her pregnancy showed.

At the center of the case was testimony during the trial that Spelling accommodated “Melrose Place” star Heather Locklear’s pregnancy and wrote the pregnancy of Tylo’s replacement, Lisa Rinna, into the show.

Grossman asked Wasserman to order a new trial, arguing that because California law does not include pregnancy as a disability, Spelling was under no legal obligation to accommodate Tylo’s pregnancy so she could keep her job. Such adjustments included changing scripts and shooting schedules or camouflaging her shape with bedsheets, bathrobes and props.

Just because Spelling gave Locklear, the show’s star, “special treatment” did not mean that Tylo was legally entitled to the same accommodations, Grossman said. He added that Tylo weighed 111 pounds when she was hired and gained 46 pounds during her pregnancy. He contended that Spelling had the right to expect that she would maintain her original weight, as her contract dictated.

“All ‘Melrose Place’ actors and actresses are thin. They all have flat, tight stomachs,” Grossman said, slapping his palm against his own abdomen, which he conceded was neither flat nor tight.

In his arguments, Grossman targeted the largest portion of the jury’s award--$4 million for emotional distress. Huge verdicts for pain, suffering and emotional distress have fallen on disfavor with the higher courts and the public in recent years, he noted.

Grossman pointed out that the award was twice what Tylo’s lawyers, Goldberg and Gloria Allred, had sought. And, quoting from a survey of verdicts from other cases decided by the appellate courts, Grossman said the $4 million was quadruple the highest damages awarded in California--or anywhere--for emotional distress in an employment discrimination case.

In California, he added, the median award for emotional distress in employment discrimination cases was $40,000. The highest award was $1.1 million.

Goldberg countered that the survey was skewed because it did not take into account verdicts that weren’t appealed. Still, even the jury awards Goldberg cited did not exceed $2 million.

In the California case that generated the $1.1-million award, Grossman said, the plaintiff alleged retaliation by a supervisor after she filed a discrimination complaint. The emotional distress resulted in headaches, nightmares, chest pains and a suicide attempt, he told the judge.

Tylo’s alleged emotional distress when compared to that case amounted to little more than “rather mild hurt feelings over losing a contract she had for two months,” the lawyer said.