FILED: NEW YORK COUNTY CLERK 05/09/2011

the issue of financing. The December 9 e-mail made clear that Ms. Carter purported to terminate
not because she was legitimately concerned about financing, but because she was no longer
satisfied with the contract terms she had negotiated and committed to just months before. 3
75. The December 9 e-mail also helped explain why Ms. Carter sent the purported
termination notice when she did. The only plausible conclusion is that Ms. Carter deliberately
interrupted the financing by purporting to terminate because she thought that would leave Gate
Five with no alternative but to accept the new contract she insisted upon shortly after she
purported to terminate.
76. Ms. Carter’s conduct shocked Alcon. Its senior executive’s e-mail to one of her
agents conveyed both the sense of betrayal that stemmed from her sudden abandonment of the
project, as well as the great personal hardships that her conduct would inflict on the other parties
involved. He emphasized, for example, that her sudden abandonment of the game would force
the development studios to lay off their employees and shut down their businesses, given that the
studios were committed to the project as their only source of revenue. Attaching an e-mail from
Planet Moon’s President begging Ms. Carter to “please, please make a deal today,” the Alcon
senior executive characterized her purported termination as “morally reprehensible.” Moreover,
her demand for a new contract meant that Alcon would have to throw out much of the due
diligence and analysis it had painstakingly prepared over the course of many months, and re-start
the process from scratch.
77. Not long after Ms. Carter’s lawyer sent the December 9 e-mail, Alcon withdrew
from the project because it regarded Ms. Carter as an unreliable and erratic business partner.
3 Contemporaneous text messages from Ms. Carter’s creative director, Frank Gatson, support the same conclusion.
When a Mako employee asked him why Ms. Carter had terminated, he said nothing about Gate Five’s finances.
Rather, he linked her termination with her compensation, stating that “she thought the deal used her instead of pay
her” and that they should give her what she wants because “she is a big star. Very big.”
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