Two of the fittest celebrities are duking it out—in court, that is.
David Beckham filed a lawsuit back in May against the gym F45 Training, which is co-owned by Mark Wahlberg, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. The former soccer star alleges that F45 didn’t uphold its end of their contract, in which Beckham promoted the fitness brand ahead of its IPO in 2021.
“F45 substantially benefited from its relationship with Beckham, who enhanced F45’s public profile and credibility,” Beckham’s lawyers said in court documents cited by the Times. They added that the company did not give Beckham the “substantial cash and equity compensation” that it had promised him in their agreement.
According to the documents viewed by The New York Times, the two had reached a promotional agreement that would have seen Beckham receive almost 1 million shares of stock, plus $5 million of extra shares. Beckham claims, though, that when F45’s business began to dip in 2022, it held on to the millions of dollars it owed him. Additionally, his lawyers noted that when the company went public, its valuation was about three times what it had been two years prior, before Beckham’s involvement.
Now Beckham is seeking more than $14 million in damages, not including interest, the Times wrote. (The athlete says a delay in getting him the first 1 million shares cost him $9.3 million, because the stock price eventually fell.) While neither Beckham’s nor Wahlberg’s camp responded to the newspaper’s requests for comment, F45’s lawyers rebutted Beckham’s claims in court documents. (Wahlberg bought a 36 percent stake in F45 back in 2019, and he also sits on the company’s board.) They said Beckham didn’t carry out all of his duties and that he’s “attempting to benefit from his own wrongdoing and has unclean hands,” according to the publication.
F45, which has more than 2,000 studios around the world, has been embroiled in legal controversy before. In 2017, former NFL wide receiver Terrell Owens sued the company; while the football player was paid $15,000 for a promo video, he claimed that the brand was supposed to pay him $25,000 for each of the first 25 F45 gym openings, as well as $5,000 for any new gyms from then on. The Times noted that it’s not clear how that case ended, although a F45 spokesperson said at the time that Owens’s claims were a “total fabrication.”
