I knew that Millionaire Matchmaker Patti Stanger was a Sensa spokesperson, but I had no idea that Octavia Spencer was working for Sensa too. The company may have wanted it that way. Sensa is a weight loss product that people sprinkle on their food to supposedly control appetite. It has not been proven effective in any clinical tests, but it may work as a placebo and a reminder for portion control.

Last year, Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer agreed to represent Sensa for a fee of $1.25 million. Octavia wanted to ensure that associating with a weight loss brand didn’t hurt her credibility as an actress. In her contract with the company, Octavia insisted that all tweets she made on behalf of Sensa were labeled with a hashtag #spon to indicate that they were sponsored tweets. This is technically required by federal law, but few celebrities adhere to this law. Octavia’s contract with Sensa also stipulated that none of her ads for the company would run in tabloids, and that Sensa would not use before and after photos of her. She did make an ad for Sensa (above) indicating that she’d lost 20 pounds with their food sprinkle packets, and she tweeted about her success with the product. Despite agreeing to Octavia’s terms, Sensa paid her just $550,000 out of the agreed upon $1.25 million and then tried to fire her. She’s now suing them for $700,000 for breach of contract. Oh and Sensa promised to give $100,000 to charity but of course they didn’t do that either.

For those who believe that a Hollywood actress would do practically anything in an endorsement deal, Octavia Spencer has filed a lawsuit that suggests otherwise.

Spencer, who won an Academy Award for best supporting actress in 2011’s Help, says that when she agreed to endorse Sensa Products, she made it clear that she would only promote a “healthier lifestyle” and not significant weight loss. She says she passed up a $3 million offer from another weight loss company to take Sensa’s $1.25 million one (with an additional $100,000 going to charity) because the company agreed to various stipulations, including that the ad campaign wouldn’t focus on significant weight transformation, wouldn’t use before and after photographs and wouldn’t be placed in tabloid magazines or on gossip websites.

But according to a breach-of-contract and fraud lawsuit filed on Wednesday in L.A. Superior Court, the ad campaign didn’t go so well, and at some point, after the actress had lived up to her side of the agreement by losing the contractually required amount of weight, Sensa began “scheming” to extradite itself from paying the actress.

Among Sensa’s alleged actions was sending the actress a termination notice dated Aug. 6 that claimed Spencer was in breach of her agreement by insisting upon adding the hashtag “#spon” at the end of her tweets for the diet product company.

“Sensa manufactures and markets a diet product designed to trick one’s brain,” says Spencer’s lawsuit. “Therefore, it’s not surprising that it would manufacture allegations against its most prominent spokesperson, Octavia Spencer.”

To understand the allegations concerning the tweets, it’s necessary to know that in October 2009, the Federal Trade Commission promulgated new guidelines that made it clear that “celebrities have a duty to disclose their relationships with advertisers when making endorsements outside the context of traditional ads, such as on talk shows or in social media.”

Since then, some careful celebrities on Twitter have been using hashtags like #spon or #paid so as to avoid confusion over tweets that stem from promotional relationships. There is, of course, a downside to doing this: Labeling tweets as sponsored might make for less effective product pitches.

In Spencer’s endorsement agreement with Sensa Products, which is provided in part in the complaint, there’s a provision that’s titled “Social Media Legal Compliance,” that is meant to “ensure that all social media content created and/or published by [Spencer] comply with all relevant laws, regulations and rules including, without limitation the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Guidelines concerning the use of endorsements and testimonial in advertising (i.e., including disclosure language such as #SPON) …”

And so, Spencer posted tweets like the following: “Bet you’ve seen my @SensaWeightloss commercials & wondered if it’s the real deal? I’m here to say it works! #spon”

In the termination letter that was sent to Spencer last month, she was allegedly blamed for the failed advertising campaign. Her failure to get a half-dozen tweets preapproved and her insistence on using “#spon” were said in the letter to have constituted a material breach of her endorsement contract.

But the lawsuit implies that this was some kind of pretext for getting out of paying the $700,000 remaining on her million-dollar contract.

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

The article goes on to say that Sensa staged weigh-ins to see if Octavia gained back the weight she’d lost. Sensa higher-ups were hoping that Octavia couldn’t maintain her weight loss and that they’d be able to drop her for breach of contract. When they found that Octavia hadn’t gained any weight back, they resorted to petty complaints about how her tweets weren’t pre-approved. According to her lawsuit, Octavia tried to work with Sensa to remedy the problem. Sensa ultimately came up with an excuse to drop her when the campaign didn’t perform as expected.

The Sensa people knew what they were getting into when the signed the contract. Octavia had standards which she made perfectly clear from the beginning. If Sensa didn’t want to work with Octavia under those stipulations then they should not have agreed to them. It sounds like they were willing to make a bunch of promises, only to try and weasel out of them. I do think they owe her the $700,000.

This makes me sad, though. Octavia needed the money obviously but she wasn’t willing to sell herself out entirely. She’s been very open about the fact that she’s not worried about her weight, that she’s “not trying to conform to an unrealistic standard of beauty” (her words) and that she finds the media’s obsession with weight to be detrimental . She tried to do this deal the right way, and she ended up getting screwed by a weight loss company.

The Hollywood Reporter article mentioned that another company offered Octavia $3 million for a sponsorship deal. If that was Jenny Craig or Nutrisystem I understand why she turned it down, but what if it was Weight Watchers? I think she would have been treated fairly by Weight Watchers, they seem like a decent company. Weight Watchers’ message, that you can eat what you want in moderation and lose weight gradually, is more in tune with Octavia’s philosophy.

Here’s one of Octavia’s Sensa ads

Octavia is shown in May (blue dress), June (pink dress) and July (white and black dress). You can tell she’s lost weight since we saw her during awards season in 2012. She looks great! Photo credit: Fame Flynet and WENN.com