Shannen Doherty Reveals Breast Cancer, Sues Management Firm for Neglecting Insurance

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The actress says mastectomy and chemotherapy could have been avoided.

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Beverly Hills 90201 star Shannen Doherty has made a stunning revelation in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday. The actress says in court documents that in March, she discovered she had invasive breast cancer and that it had spread during a time when she was uninsured.

She's suing the business management firm of Tanner Mainstain, saying it was their job to ensure timely payment of the medical insurance premiums she had through the Screen Actors Guild.

"In November 2013, SAG sent the premium invoice to Tanner Mainstain for Plaintiff's medical insurance coverage for the year 2014," states the complaint obtained by The Hollywood Reporter (read here). "However, Defendants ignored it, failed to pay it (without informing Plaintiff) and then promptly terminated their relationship with [Doherty] effective February 7, 2014."

After she was fired by her management firm, she was uninsured — which Doherty says she didn't realize. She eventually re-enrolled with SAG insurance for 2015, and began seeing doctors. That's when she was given her cancer diagnosis.

According to the complaint, "Plaintiff was also informed that, had she been insured and able to visit her doctor, the cancer could potentially have been stopped, thus obviating the need for the future treatment (including mastectomy and chemotherapy) that Plaintiff will likely have to suffer through now."

That's not all being alleged against Tanner Mainstain through her attorney Devin McRae at Early Sullivan, who took on the firm last year with allegations that James Franco management commissions had been diverted. (That case settled.)

"In truth, the firm and former partner [Steven] Blatt specialize in fleecing actors and entertainment industry professionals," states a complaint alleging breach of contract, fiduciary duty, conversion, negligence and more. "After gaining control of all of their clients' cash and assets, they find a way to lose it, sometimes by gross incompetence, sometimes by self-dealing and outright theft. Along the way, they habitually deceive their clients, going so far as to set up bogus transactions, to conceal their misdeeds, errors and omissions. The firm has hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme."

Doherty says accounting records reflect "strange and unexplained transfers" to unidentified individuals, the overcharging of management fees, missed tax payment and subsequent tax liens, wrongfully diverted insurance settlement money over property damage from a storm.

McRae is also representing Doherty's husband, photographer Kurt Iswarienko, in a separate, but similar lawsuit against Tanner Mainstain. This lawsuit also includes allegations relating to taxes, plus claims the firm managed an investment property he owned.Tanner Mainstain allegedly failed to make payments on a mortgage loan, resulting in a "quick foreclosure and loss of the Property, which Plaintiff was powerless to stop."

The second lawsuit also alleges missed credit card bill payments, sinking his credit rating and making it difficult to obtain financing. That is said to have harmed him when he purchased an airplane. After Tanner Mainstain stopped representing Iswarienko, he was informed by a bank that the purported loan he got was really "a high interest advance and that no loan had actually been negotiated yet."

The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Tanner Mainstain for a response

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Shannen Doherty's cancer feels personal to Gen X

Analysis by Marianne Garvey, CNN

(CNN)Shannen Doherty and I graduated high school the same year, even though hers was the fictional West Beverly High and mine was in New York. We've never met, but she's someone I greatly admire and feels like a friend. So I found myself in tears on Tuesday when I read Doherty's breast cancer had returned after a remission.

Before the age of influencers, streaming and WiFi in every home (I'm now 44), we had basic big-box television. As a young teenager obsessed with all things Hollywood, Doherty was a major player in a world I could only glimpse on that TV, in her role as Brenda Walsh in "Beverly Hills, 90210."



I loved watching Doherty as Brenda -- back when you actually had to wait an entire week to watch a new episode. She was a badass brunette in a sea of blonde actresses and the Barbie dolls I grew up playing with. Even though we are both Irish girls, to me she had an exotic type of beauty.

My weeks and years were filled with thoughts and theories and chats with my teenage friends about Brenda's love triangle with Dylan McKay (Luke Perry) and Kelly Taylor (Jenni Garth). I liked Brenda and her bangs and belted jeans. She was caring and adventurous. She had a sweet twin brother and rode on the back of Dylan's motorcycle and traveled to Paris. She lost her virginity and wanted to be popular. That "90210" guitar riff and clap is forever Brenda burned in my brain.

There was also "Heathers," the 1988 dark comedy in which Doherty played Heather Duke (one of the Heathers), with her '80s wardrobe and her perfect take on the popular girl's best friend, who eventually takes the cool-girl crown.

I didn't live in a wealthy alternate universe like Beverly Hills or in the dark teenage corners of "Heathers," but I still identified with these characters. Doherty's struggles off-screen, which I'd read about in my teen magazines, were also fascinating yet relatable. Here I was, on my bedroom floor, 3000 miles away in every sense, somehow feeling like I understood her. Yes, Doherty was late to set at times and had messy public relationships, but she always owned it.

In 2010, while promoting her book "Badass: A Hard-Earned Guide to Living Life with Style and (the Right) Attitude," Doherty told Parade she was determined to learn from her mistakes.

"I have a rep. Did I earn it? Yeah, I did. But, after a while you sort of try to shed that rep because you're kind of a different person," Doherty said. "You've evolved and all of the bad things you've done in your life have brought you to a much better place."

I grew and evolved in a parallel world to Doherty, but her stage 4 breast cancer diagnosis feels oddly personal. Robert J. Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, draws a direct line from those feelings to the impact of "90210."

"For many, the seasons of '90210,' especially the early four seasons in which Doherty appeared, gave voice to a set of ideas, worries, and desires that television hadn't spent much time with in the past, including some pretty heavy themes like rape, substance abuse, bigotry, cancer, suicide, and lots more," Thompson told CNN. "For many people of a certain age, this show provided an important conversation as they grew up. It should come as no surprise, then, that those viewers would be very troubled by the recent news... we already observed this with the death of Luke Perry."



"One of the reasons, along with Luke -- that I did '90210' and didn't really tell anybody because I thought, people can look at that other people with stage 4 can work too. Like, you know, our life doesn't end the minute we get that diagnosis. We still have some living to do," Doherty told ABC News this week.

She's still a badass.

"I think the thing I want to do the most right now is I want to make an impact," she added. "I want to be remembered for something bigger than just me."

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Shannen Doherty feels she's been "written off" from acting since announcing she has stage 4 breast cancer last year

“A lot of people who get diagnosed with Stage 4, they sort of get written off,” Doherty said on Good Morning America, while promoting her two Lifetime movies she's starring in this weekend. “It’s assumed that they cannot work or they can’t work at their full capacity, and that is not true.” She added: “That is something that I would really like for people to stop assuming and give us a chance to prove them wrong.”