Power Jab! Floyd Mayweather Sues Showtime For $340M, Boxer Claims “Elaborate Scheme Of Financial Fraud” By Channel, Exec & Ex-Aide
Almost eight years after retiring from professional boxing, Floyd Mayweather Jr. is climbing into the legal right today to take on Paramount-owned Showtime over “hundreds of millions of dollars in the misappropriated funds and damages resulting from a long-running and elaborate scheme of financial fraud.”
Estimated to have close to a billion bucks over his 21-year pro career, the undefeated boxer wants over “$340,000,000” in damages from the premium cable network, a fraud and unjust enrichment lawsuit filed Tuesday in LA Superior Court says. Also suing Stephen Espinoza, ex-chief of the now shuttered Showtime Sports, Mayweather claims the net still owes him around $20 million from his 2015 welterweight championship fight against Andre Berto.
Basically Mayweather and his attorney say money due the boxer known as “Money” was knowingly deposited by Espinoza and Showtime into accounts run by his ex-manager Al Haymon. Oddly enough, while repeatedly citing his former manager and long time advisor (now ex-advisor) Haymon as the mastermind of the alleged big bucks scam, the little seen or heard from Mayweather “father figure” Haymon is not named as a defendant in the 25-page complaint.
Showtime
Along with cameo appearances by HBO and Vegas’ MGM Grand, what is mentioned in the filing by Costa Mesa attorney Samini Block is that “over approximately two decades of managing Mayweather, Haymon engaged in a pattern of financial manipulation and self-dealing behind Mayweather’s back.”
Now, in a world where most sports have no one is every going to tell you that boxing in an avarice or sticky fingers free sport. Certainly, as too many prizefighters like the now 48-year-old Floyd Mayweather Jr. have learned, not paying attention to the money and the purse has consequences above and beyond the fine print in or out of your prime.
To that, Tuesday’s complaint also notes that when “Mayweather’s new team” went to Showtime in 2024 for documents and accounting related to the big ticket pay-per-view Manny Pacquiao fight of 2015 or the much watched PPV 2017 dust-up with MMA star Conor McGregor, they got TKO’d. Mayweather’s Richard Schaefer-led reps were informed by Haymon and Showtime that the materials they sought were “lost in a flood” or “stored off-site and not readily accessible.”
All of which adds up to, according to the complaint (with some sarcasm about said flood), tainting the notoriously livin’ large Mayweather with “(false) rumors that he was ‘broke’” and led to “reputational harm and mental anguish.”
Showtime’s parent company Paramount did not respond to Deadline’s request for comment on Floyd Mayweather’s suit. Though the complaint postulates that Stephen Espinoza, who left Showtime almost three years ago once the plug was pulled on the Sports division, is working with the very Al Haymon who he allegedly aided in siphoning off cash from Floyd Mayweather, Deadline cannot verify the validity of that information or professional relationship.
