The Hollywood Creative Alliance (formerly known as Hollywood Critics Association) is suing the Critics Choice Association for defamation in response to the org’s recent call for members to resign from the HCA in order to stay members of the CCA.
According to court documents, the HCA claims the CCA has defamed the organization in an “attempt to boycott and steal members of the HCA” and is seeking “preliminary and permanent injunctive relief” along with “appropriate compensatory remedies and fees and costs” in response to the organization’s actions.
The suit comes just weeks after the Critics Choice Association announced HCA members would no longer be allowed to maintain membership within the CCA, and those who held memberships to both organizations would need to confirm they’d “successfully resigned from HCA” if they looked to remain a CCA member.
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In a letter to its members, the Critics Choice Association board alleged to have “evidence that a representative of the HCA has improperly suggested to at least one studio (and we suspect more) that it could influence Critics Choice Awards voting in a way that led that studio to reach out to CCA and request that action be taken to protect the integrity of our awards.”
The HCA is claiming that the CCA has been successful in its calls for dual members to resign from the HCA, stating how numbers of overlapping members in both organizations went from 75 members to 5 in the days after CCA sent its memo.
“HCA is informed and believes that CCA understood that HCA’s membership substantially overlapped with CCA’s much larger membership. HCA further is informed and believes that CCA knew that the coercive effects of its demand that its members resign en masse from HCA, coupled with its defamatory falsehoods about voting irregularities, would deprive HCA of a critical mass of members and its ability to continue operating as a meaningful competitor of CCA,” reads the complaint.
The HCA declined to comment further on the development.
