An investor and a broker are suing the Dodgers star and his agent, claiming they unfairly forced them out of the housing development.
Shohei Ohtani and his agent sabotaged real estate developers in Hawaii, engineering “their wrongful and pretextual termination,” which cost them millions of dollars, according to a recently filed state lawsuit.
Investor Kevin Hayes and broker Tomoko Matsumoto claimed that Ohtani, the Los Angeles Dodgers superstar, and agent Nez Balelo launched an “unlawful scheme” to “wrongfully interfere” with their plans to build a luxury residential development within the Mauna Kea Resort, according to their complaint, which was filed Friday in Hawaii First Circuit Court.
The $240 million housing project was set to be built on the Big Island’s Hapuna Coast, The Associated Press reported. The plaintiffs said they got Ohtani to be a celebrity endorser of the development in 2023.
“Though not a party to the agreement, Nez Balelo, a high-powered agent at Creative Artists Agency and Ohtani’s longtime representative, inserted himself into every aspect of the relationship,” the lawsuit says.
“Balelo quickly became a disruptive force. He treated the Endorsement Agreement as a one-way street and responded to business matters with stonewalling or hostility. Whenever challenged, Balelo resorted to his go-to tactic: threat of default. On numerous occasions, Plaintiffs were told that unless they conceded to Balelo’s ever-increasing demands, Ohtani would walk away from the deal,” it says.
Ohtani and Balelo pressured other investors to eventually dump Hayes and Matsumoto from the project, according to the lawsuit.
“Plaintiffs were given no warning and no opportunity to properly respond to their wrongful and pretextual termination, other than a brief phone call,” it says.
“The pretext for this … was a fabricated allegation: that Plaintiffs had misused Ohtani’s NIL rights by including his image on a website promoting (the project).”
“”NIL” stands for name, image and likeness. NIL rights can be highly lucrative for prominent sports figures.
Large swaths of the 13-page civil complaint were redacted in the publicly listed filing in spots that seemed to detail the defendants’ alleged misdeeds.
The plaintiffs’ attorney, Edward Saffrey, and Balelo could not e immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.
Balelo and CAA are behind Ohtani’s free agent deal with the Dodgers, which is one of the most lucrative — and management-friendly — contracts in MLB history.
When the two-way star Ohtani agreed to play for the Dodgers in the winter of 2023-24, it was reported to be the biggest contract in baseball history, at $700 million for 10 seasons.
But within days, it emerged that most of that money will come in backloaded payments scheduled for years down the road and well after Ohtani’s likely retirement from baseball. The reported $700 million deal is worth closer to $462 million in monetary value of 2023-24.
New York Yankees free agent Juan Soto agreed his winter to a $765 million deal with the archrival Mets. The money from that deal is not backloaded like Ohtani’s.
