RJ Cipriani's lawsuit against Jeff Shell (pictured) has ensnared yet another business titan. Zuffa LLC Would he or wouldn’t he? That was the question!
Pro gambler RJ Cipriani filed a $150 million lawsuit on Monday against Paramount Skydance president Jeff Shell, alleging he’s owed the nine-figure sum for his services as a crisis communications consultant. Cipriani also alleges Shell burned him by not helping produce a TV show in return for his professional advice, and that he leaked him deets on high-profile Paramount deals.
Cipriani had previously sent Shell a draft complaint, I reported. The press got wind of the unfiled suit without seeing the full bombshell allegations, and the town unofficially had been placing odds at 50-50 that the notorious Vegas fixture would actually go through with his threatened legal action.
On Monday morning, Cipriani rolled the dice and filed the papers in LA Superior Court, even dragging several powerbrokers into the fray, with big names mentioned in the the legal papers from super-agent Ari Emanuel and Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav to Hollywood media magnate Jay Penske and Hunter Biden.
The court docs allege that Shell and Cipriani were engaged in a business arrangement for a year-and-a-half, with Cipriani giving Shell advice on press. The suit also alleges Shell shared company intel with Cipriani about Paramount, and that Shell agreed to help produce a show, called “Star Serenade,” in exchange for Cipriani’s advice.
Ari Emanuel at the UFC 281 event at Madison Square Garden on November 12, 2022. Zuffa LLC Sifting through the 67-page complaint requires a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, a source once described Cipriani to me thusly: “He’s an arsonist cosplaying as a firefighter.”
But there are a number of revealing exchanges between Shell, Cipriani and other players contained in the legal docs.
“Hey do you have a second to talk this after? I need your help/guidance re South Park,” Shell allegedly writes in a text to Cipriani that was attached to the complaint. (Paramount struck a $1.5 billion deal for “South Park” rights last year.)
In another exchange attached to the complaint, Cipriani takes a victory lap for placing, or massaging, three articles in The Hollywood Reporter, one of which prompts Shell to enthuse, “I love you!!!! The hunter Biden thing is awesome. Thank you.”
“Jeff Shell is not the first heavyweight in Hollywood to try to use RJ to repair their public reputation or to prevent bad press from coming out,” Cipriani’s attorney Steven Aaronoff told me after filing the breach of contract and fraud claim.
Unlike Shell, Emanuel never responds to any of Cipriani’s texts that are in the legal filing beyond liking a “Happy Hanukkah” missive, and responding to a message wishing the mega-agent a new year that’s “great for you and your family in EVERY WAY!!” with a prayer hands emoji.
But the lawsuit claims that in late 2019, Cipriani “rendered crisis communications services on behalf of Mr. Emanuel [and] successfully suppressed negative media coverage that would have been materially damaging to Mr. Emanuel’s personal and professional reputation, and therefore the reputation of WME. The breadth of Mr. Emanuel’s exposure during this period — including a highly publicized international arbitration involving a prominent Hollywood producer — has since been extensively documented in the trade press.” (Emanuel declined to comment.)
I’ll save everyone the sleuthing. The producer is Emanuel’s longtime client Joel Silver. (The arbitration involved film financier Daryl Katz, who was accused by Cipriani’s wife, actress Greice Santo, of sexual misconduct. Katz’s attorneys then accused Cipriani and Santo of attempting to extort $3 million from Katz, Variety reported at the time.) Attorney Patty Glaser represented Santo in that matter, but not by taking the conventional route of suing Katz. Instead, Cipriani and Santo sued Katz’s crisis publicist.
Pro-gambler RJ Cipriani filed a $150 million lawsuit on Monday against Paramount Skydance president Jeff Shell. Glaser — who I previously reported was representing Shell while maintaining some kind of decade-long attorney-client relationship with Cipriani — is never named in Cipriani’s latest suit. But Glaser, I reported, connected Shell and Cipriani back in 2024 to broker a détente between Shell and former NBCUniversal honcho Ron Meyer.
The suit also goes into detail on a summit that an unnamed Glaser spearheaded to help Shell and Cipriani “resolve the dispute between them.” The dispute stemmed from an alleged promise made by Shell to make Cipriani’s reality show “Star Serenade.”
“Shell’s attorney” — i.e., Glaser — “privately offered Plaintiff a personal ‘loan’ of [$150,000] from the attorney’s own funds, which the attorney represented would never need to be repaid. This extraordinary offer — in which an attorney proposed to use the attorney’s own personal funds to resolve a dispute adverse to the attorney’s own current client — constitutes a powerful admission that Shell’s attorney recognized the merit and strength of Plaintiff’s claims,” the suit says.
But along the way, Shell disclosed to Cipriani “his disdain” for Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav “and stated that Paramount’s senior leadership would not be retaining Zaslav in any post-merger capacity because they considered him to be incompetent and also to be a ‘suck-up’ overly enamored of Hollywood celebrities,” the complaint says.
“Shell further disclosed at this meeting that Paramount intended to enhance and ‘sweeten’ its pending hostile tender offer for Warner Bros. Discovery to $30 per share in cash, with additional financial commitments. This information was not publicly announced until February 10, 2026, eight days after Shell disclosed it to [Cipriani],” the lawsuit continues.
The court papers further say: “Shell then stated words to the effect: ‘We’re paying way too much for Warner Bros. If we could just wait another year, we could get it a whole lot cheaper.’ The President and Director of Paramount thus disclosed to a non-insider, in his own words, that his company was knowingly overpaying in the largest media acquisition in history.”
The suit says that such disclosures are a violation of SEC regulations and that Cipriani reported them to the agency as a registered whistleblower. (Aaronoff says that investigation is ongoing.)
The complaint also attaches a text exchange between Shell and Cipriani that involves Paramount’s recent UFC deal, well before it was inked. Cipriani asks Shell if UFC boss Dana White helped make the $7 billion-plus deal happen. He says no and claims only Emanuel knows about it. Even White doesn’t know about it yet. (But now Cipriani knows about it!)
Meanwhile, Shell’s wife, Laura Fay Shell, is a named defendant. According to the complaint, Shell fraudulently transferred one or more assets to her in an attempt “to hinder, delay, and defraud” Cipriani.
All of this begs one obvious question: Why was Shell, who had been fired from his top perch at NBCUniversal for sexually harassing CNBC anchor Hadley Gamble and had a second life at Paramount, discussing internal company information with Cipriani?
The lawsuit hints at the answer. The complaint alleges that Shell told Cipriani during their first meeting that the Gamble correspondence “would absolutely destroy me.” And the suit says there was “yet another woman in the media industry” with claims similar to Gamble’s.
“Jeff Shell is a two-time loser in terms of showing that he’s not fit to lead a publicly traded corporation,” Aaronoff tells me.
Shell declined comment for this story, but Glaser referred us to a previous comment — and declined to comment further — which had said of Cipriani’s initial allegations: “We were presented with a draft complaint riddled with clear errors of fact and law and the threat that it would be filed, but if he makes the mistake of going ahead with it, we will strongly respond.”
