The former owner of WGGB in Springfield, Mass. is suing Charter Communications two years after he sold the station to Meredith.
Masslive reports John Gormally says Charter shorted him on retransmission fees a year before he sold the station in 2014.
Gormally accuses Charter of fraud and breach of contract for not including Worcester viewers in its calculations over what it would pay for retransmitting the Springfield, Mass. ABC-Fox affiliate’s signal.
“Because Charter’s information concerning subscribers was not public, and known only to Charter,” says the lawsuit. “And because Gormally had no alternative but to accept as true Charter’s representations concerning its subscribers, Charter was bound by a duty or relation to Gormally to speak accurately concerning its subscribers.”
From Masslive:
The amount of money being sought, as well as the number of subscribers in question and the retransmission rates in the contract, are not public. They were redacted from the publicly available filing, after Charter filed a motion to impound the information, arguing that the revelation of its “highly sensitive business information” would cause competitive harm to the company.
Gormally’s suit says that in early 2013, his company and Charter were in negotiations to renew Charter’s contract to retransmit his signals. Those negotiations were based in part on the number of Charter subscribers who would receive the broadcasts — figures that were not public information.