Glad to hear you are well.
I have one question regarding the "rich" debate. It's more a curious question than needing to know.
I've worked for a place or two that is kind of how you described (owner was in their 40s but had a 22 year old pregnant GF with a job there) and something I've noticed a couple would do is have a lot of their property owned by the LLC instead of directly by them. Is any of Pete's stuff owned by the company? It's seemed that way if he's taking money directly out to support a lavish lifestyle. Again, more curious because of the way it sounds and what I've seen other entrepreneurs do, they're technically poor in those cases.
The DIS itself is owned by Werner Travel Media LLC and then the staff are mostly employees of Dreams Unlimited Travel (INC?) and then he does have some possessions in his names like cars and credit cards but most everything just filters through the company.
I spoke with several attorneys over the years over harassment in the workplace but nobody wanted to take the case. It wasn’t because they thought I would lose, they just said that there wasn’t anything for me to really ‘get’ even if I won. Plus everything would essentially be punitive like ‘emotional distress’ which is hard to put a specific dollar amount on.
Even if I had won something (like a percent of his profits or something) then he would’ve just filtered things out of the company to make sure I would never get paid. So, there wasn’t a point.
When I met Pete, he told me the most important things in his life were his family and his business and I was always really nice to his family and I greatly improved his business. I know I wasn’t great on the camera portion of his shows but I worked the DVC deal and moved it to DVCresale and negotiated everything with that so he gets $15,000 a month base plus commission on sales, so he easily makes $18k per month from that deal. Then with MTO he got around $1M in his time of being half owner and it was the thing that allowed him to keep Dreams and The Dis staffed and alive through the pandemic because that was the only income he was getting at that time. Other people helped of course and he did build a platform but his response back was so ridiculous. In summer 2020, Pete ended our relationship. He said he was unhappy and just wanted to be my business partner and friend. I accepted this.
Towards the end of the year, I told him that my ex (now husband) wanted to get back together with me and Pete encouraged me to do so. He said we were a great fit and that razek clearly cared about me and that we were more grown up now and maybe the timing would be right so we got together. Flash forward a while and I’m with my now husband, Pete was with Federico (the guy with Si Disney, I believe) and this agent tried to screw me out of a deal at Margaritaville. Pete was really angry and got very protective and was threatening to call the mafia, it got crazy. But somewhere in there he fell back in love with me and wanted me back. I told him no, he has ended things long ago, I moved on and he moved on. He was furious and that’s when the threats started, he started attacking me daily and demanding I be with him again but I wouldn’t go back, so he kept threatening MTO and particularly firing Danielle because she was a real life friend of mine before coming to work there (so was Ruben but he didn’t threaten him as much) And I just couldn’t take it anymore. Things really started spiraling and I knew I’d never be able to work cohesively with him.
Eventually we went to dinner in March of 2022 and Pete told me he and federico were over and because he wanted me and I told him that I didn’t want him still but as my friend, I needed to tell him something.
I let him know that I was concerned that I was becoming an alcoholic. I had started drinking a lot during the pandemic and never really slowed down and I was just worried about myself. He said I had his full support and that he would be there for me as a friend if I ever wanted to talk and invited me to AA. Flash forward, he got mad at me and started in about me being a drunk and an alcoholic and how I was gonna die in a gutter as a drunk and a
bleep. I asked him how he felt as an AA sponsor that he would ever cross that line and mock someone who comes to you saying they are worried about their drinking and he didn’t care one bit. Of course I was also hitting below the belt in the fight too but I had to sit and think ‘what am I doing here? Why am I fighting with this person?’ - the one thing I still admired about Pete was that he found a way to get over addiction. I grew up in a family with very bad drug problems (prescription and crack and stuff) and they never could kick the habit and I really respected that from him. It was the last thing I respected and it was gone. That’s when the negotiations started because he said he hated real estate and that deal fell through, I had recorded enough videos to get through early May and then nothing went up again until July because he wouldn’t let me in the studio and then by the next month, I had found an attorney, this site and knew I needed to leave.
