LOS ANGELES (Legal Newsline) – Actors instructed to rob a jewelry shop for an episode of NCIS: New Orleans but were instead taken down by a real-life SWAT team won’t be able to sue CBS.
The California Second Appellate District ruled Aug. 25 that the conduct at issue occurred in Louisiana and couldn’t be tied to California - a state that allows litigants up to three years to file fraud lawsuits.
But Louisiana’s statute of limitations is only one year, and since Louisiana law applied to the claims of Justin LeBrun, Bradford Roublow and Suleman Virani, they can’t pursue their lawsuit in California courts. They had filed their case nearly three years after the scene-gone-wrong.
“Those acts occurred in Louisiana, to residents of Louisiana, resulting in juries in Louisiana,” Justice Thomas Willhite wrote for the court.
LeBrun and Roublow were actors living in New Orleans in 2017, when NCIS: New Orleans producer Derrick Wells organized a guerilla-style shoot of a jewelry store robbery at a real-life store owned by Virani. It would be filmed by a camera installed in the store.
Covered in black clothing and ski masks and armed with prop assault rifles, they jumped out of an unmarked van to fake-storm Virani, who was hired to portray the owner of his own shop.
Unfortunately for the actors, CBS hadn’t alerted authorities that the attack was fake and no one from the show informed passers-by either. A neighboring business owner called the police, and a SWAT team responded to the scene within minutes.
They held their weapons at LeBrun and Roublow, who tried to explain they were filming a TV show. The SWAT team pushed them to the ground, handcuffed them and arrested them. Roublow was released but LeBrun was sent to jail.
Wells and the show’s head of production asked the police not to press charges against the actors or the network. LeBrun and Roublow say they have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and Virani said his store suffered a significant drop in business after customers learned it was his store involved in the incident, which was publicized by LeBrun and Roublow despite CBS asking them not to speak about it.
But they waited too long to sue in Louisiana, so they tried to tie their case to California by arguing CBS supervised the show from its Los Angeles facilities. They said the act of a Los Angeles-based employee speaking to Louisiana police ratified the conduct to allow the case to be brought in California.
“In this case,” Willhite wrote, “the acts for which plaintiffs seek damages are the fraudulent misrepresentations and omissions made by Wells.