WELLINGTON, Fla. – Marcus Lemonis is touted as a business guru and savior of dying companies on the reality show "The Profit" on CNBC, but one South Florida businesswoman claims in court that all he did was try to kill hers.
Gigi Stetler was successful in what is normally a man's world, the RV business. But in 2009, before Lemonis landed his show, her business, RV Sales of Broward, fell apart. She blames it on Lemonis and Palm Beach developer Mark Bellissimo, both of whom she alleges in a civil suit unlawfully conspired to run her out of business.
"I see him as a monster," Stetler said of Lemonis.
Stetler's attorneys have filed a lawsuit -- that appears to finally be on the verge of going to trial -- naming Lemonis's firm and Bellissimo seeking millions of dollars in damages on allegations of conspiracy, unlawful trade practices and theft of trade secrets.
Lemonis calls it a shakedown attempt and said he will never settle the suit or negotiate with Stetler.
"I'm sure she’s a wonderful person. I don’t think she’s a monster and I'm surprised she would say those things about me," said Lemonis, who grew up in Miami and ran, unsuccessfully, for a seat in the Florida Legislature in 1996 at the age of 22. "She should think before she speaks."
The story begins in the exclusive environs of the Winter Equestrian Festival in Wellington, where the daughters of Bruce Springsteen, Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg have ridden, where Stetler was both a rider and operated an RV campground, renting and selling RVs to the wealthy and traveling horse crowd.
She said that back in 2009, she was riding high.
"We had just done $20 million in sales," she said. "We were on fire."
She said that changed after she got a call from Marcus Lemonis, who at the time was running his own RV business, Camping World, which had become the largest in the the country. Her lawsuit claims he was interested in acquiring her business.
"I kindly said no thank you," Stetler said. "And then stuff started happening."
She claims she had a suspicious shipment of nine RVs from Fleetwood that all had defects and then Lemonis phoned her to say he knew she was having problems. She claims that GE Financial found her in wrongful default, and that Lemonis called her about that too. She said she wondered how he knew about it.
Now she believes he used his influence in the business world to effect those harms on her. He says it's not true.
"I have no relationship with GE Financial," he said. "I’ve always had a relationship with Fleetwood. They don't communicate with me concerning their business with other dealers."
He said he didn't remember how he first came into contact with her business, but believed she initially contacted him about an RV bedding line.
"Her business wasn’t big enough for us to pay any attention to in the first place," he said, noting that she has had several defaults in her business history.
Stetler and her attorney, Jamie Sasson, admitted they had no proof that Lemonis was involved in her default, which led to the repossession of her RV inventory, or the Fleetwood mess. But she hadn't seen the last of Lemonis.
At the time Bellissimo, who has been described as an "equestrian mogul," owned the Winter Equestrian Festival and so was in effect her landlord for the RV campgrounds she had there. She said he asked her for detailed information about her business prior to what she expected to be a routine contract renewal.
"He asked me for my whole business plan to figure out what he was going to charge me," she said.
Stetler said she supplied the information, including a full customer list. But shortly after Bellissimo, who is often photographed with friend Donald Trump, gave her bad news: He was killing her campground lease and sponsorship deal.
And he was giving it to Lemonis at Camping World.
"He calls me on the phone [and says], 'I signed a contract with Camping World, we no longer need your services,'" she said. "I'm like, 'What? The campground is mine, I built it.' He said nope, you're done."
She said Camping World RVs and advertisements replaced hers overnight. And she says that she noticed that the RVs were familiar -- they were the same RVs that had been repossessed from her by GE Financial. She called the police and the report backs up her contention, but there was nothing deemed illegal about it.
Not to be stopped, Stetler says she opened a small competing campground nearby, where she rented RVs at half the price of Camping World. Tension ran high between the companies.
"I get an email from a lawyer," she said. "I have a trespassing letter."
Bellissimo trespassed her off the Winter Equestrian Festival property completely, banning her from coming on the grounds at all, either to ride or to network with her customers whom she'd been working with for years.
"Now I have no business, no customers, can't reach my customers," she said.
Facing ruin, Stetler filed a protest with the United States Equestrian Federation, the governing agency for the festival, alleging she'd been wrongfully banned. Through the discovery process, she then obtained what she calls the smoking gun, emails from Camping World reps, including Lemonis's wife and a retail president, written to Bellissimo's firm complaining that Stetler was undercutting their prices and upsetting their business. One written prior to her banning from the property said, "Stopping her would go a long way."
"This was a setup, a plan, a conspiracy to interfere with her customers and ultimately to cause her financial harm," said Sasson, her attorney.
Stetler flew to Louisville, Kentucky, for the United States Equestrian Federation hearing with her teenage son to face off against Bellissimo and his attorney.
"I didn't have a lawyer," she said. "I couldn't afford lunch, let alone a lawyer."
So she grilled Bellissimo and others on the stand herself. And she won. The United States Equestrian Federation not only ruled in her favor, saying Bellissimo had wrongfully banned her from the property, but also fined Bellissimo and ordered she be allowed back to the Winter Equestrian Festival.
When Local 10 caught up with Bellissimo on Festival grounds, he refused to comment. Stetler has been battling the case in court for years, and now it appears the case is close to going to trial. Meanwhile she is back in the saddle with a new business, Planet RV in Davie, already one of the largest RV dealers in South Florida.
Lemonis denied he did anything wrong and said he had nothing to do with Bellissimo's decision to kick her off the grounds.
"I had nothing to do with Mark Bellissimo making an independent business decision to do what he wanted to do inside his own business," said Lemonis. "If she thinks she’s going to shake me down by going to media outlets, she’s going to be very disappointed. If this goes to quote-unquote 'trial,' there will be no settlement offer, there will be no negotiation."
Stetler said she only looks forward to her day in court.
"They never thought that I would fight them," she said. "They thought I would pack my little bags and go home and cry."