{"id":247,"date":"2009-12-17T07:33:13","date_gmt":"2009-12-17T07:33:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theduanewells.com\/?p=247"},"modified":"2018-07-29T01:25:05","modified_gmt":"2018-07-29T01:25:05","slug":"madison-hildebrand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/madison-hildebrand\/","title":{"rendered":"Madison Hildebrand"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A little over a week ago, reality TV star Madison Hildebrand (pictured) was all smiles at Tthe Abbey in West Hollywood as he cohosted what was meant to be a celebratory event for the third-season finale of his hit Bravo series,\u00a0Million Dollar Listing<\/em>. The event was also intended to raise money for the Leap Foundation, a Los Angeles-based charity that aims to help high school and college students as well as recent graduates get ahead in life through seminars and mentoring with successful business professional. But what began as a celebration has quickly turned into a public relations nightmare for the recently out Hildebrand.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday morning, the cohost of the December 7 event, Michael Dean Shelton, who lists himself as a principal of MDS Consulting, sent an e-mail to Hildebrand\u2019s personal contact list of thousands of fans, friends, clients, and Facebook followers alleging that the Malibu-based celebrity realtor had hijacked money from the finale fund-raiser to cover his personal expenses.<\/p>\n

In the e-mail Shelton wrote, “It came to my attention yesterday that my co-host, Madison Hildebrand, for the December 7th, 2009 event at The Abbey, West Hollywood had decided to pocket the majority of the money raised by us for his personal expenses (please see attachment). I first need to state that The Leap Foundation nor I had ever agreed or even was told prior to the event that this was going to happen. As we told you at the event, 100 percent of the sale of raffle tickets and flat donations were to go to The Leap Foundation and portion of the sale of Madison’s book was to benefit The Foundation. Madison’s decision to renege the verbal agreement is unconscionable, at best. I have tried to contact Madison without success and so this email is my next step to regain the money that rightfully belongs to The Leap Foundation.”<\/p>\n

Hildebrand is now challenging Shelton\u2019s claims of financial impropriety and threatening legal action if Shelton does not issue a retraction. Not only does Hildebrand say that he never had any such verbal agreement with MDS or the Leap Foundation, he argues that the entire e-mail is a misrepresentation of the facts that has left him \u201cshocked\u201d and \u201calarmed.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a tersely worded e-mail from Hildebrand to Shelton that was obtained by Advocate.com Wednesday, the Bravo star writes, “Hello Michael: I am in receipt of your email that you sent this morning to me and to all of my private contacts, your contacts, and guests. I have received numerous phone calls, emails, facebook messages, and text messages from my clients, friends, and strangers alerting me and asking me what the story is. You have untruthfully stated in your email that I was in breach of an oral agreement… The email you sent this morning is defamatory.\u00a0 Please retract your statement and allegations to everyone you sent the email to.”<\/p>\n

Subsequently, in a telephone conversation on Wednesday, Hildebrand went\u00a0even further, asserting that if anyone failed to live up to\u00a0their responsibilities at the event, it\u00a0was Shelton.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a clear division of\u00a0responsibilities for the event,\u201d Hildebrand says flatly. \u201c I told\u00a0[Michael] from day one that I was interested in doing a season finale\u00a0book-signing party and that my expertise was not in throwing Hollywood\u00a0events and I knew nothing about it nor did I want to, but that I would\u00a0certainly show up, bring books, bring the season finale and that I\u00a0would even book the location and that I would do the invitation. That\u00a0was my responsibility. His responsibility was to do everything else.\u201d<\/p>\n

However,\u00a0according to Hildebrand, three days before the event, while he had done\u00a0what he had promised, his cohost had not, which began to raise\u00a0concerns for him and his assistant Heather. Hildebrand says that with\u00a0the event only days away, nothing had been confirmed and there wasn\u2019t\u00a0even so much as an alcohol sponsor.<\/p>\n

\u201cBottom line: [Michael]\u00a0didn\u2019t follow through and … left me high and dry three days before the\u00a0event with absolutely no sponsors, no step-and-repeat, no confirmed\u00a0celebrities … nothing. And that was his role,\u201d the reality star says.<\/p>\n

Hildebrand continues, \u201cHe\u00a0didn\u2019t bring the charity board … we had to rip up pieces of paper and\u00a0write numbers on them (for the raffle tickets). … The whole thing was an\u00a0embarrassment, and I feel bad for the people who did show up and\u00a0expected something different, because I was definitely expecting\u00a0something different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hildebrand says at the last minute, he was forced to call in favors\u00a0from friends and various vendors, including florists and liquor companies,\u00a0to salvage the event for the sake of the charity and his own\u00a0reputation. The\u00a0Million Dollar Listing<\/em>\u00a0star says that he even went so\u00a0far as to personally pay for the step-and-repeat (the banner used\u00a0behind celebrities for press photos) as well as the lights for the event in\u00a0spite of his request in the final days before the event to cancel the\u00a0pricey items because he would rather have had \u201ca nice event and have my\u00a0friends and fans show up, do a book signing, and watch the finale\u201d and donate the cost of the extras to the charity.<\/p>\n

Hildebrand also referenced a conversation he had with\u00a0Leap Foundation cofounder Bill Dorfman (pictured) on Tuesday evening, prior\u00a0to Shelton sending the e-mail in question to Hildebrand\u2019s personal mailing\u00a0list.<\/p>\n

In the conversation, Hildebrand says, he explained to Dorfman why he had deducted his expenses from the event\u2019s tally as well\u00a0as the circumstances that led him to make the deduction. In the final\u00a0analysis, however, Hildebrand ultimately decided to cover the event costs\u00a0himself and to send a check for the full amount raised to the Leap\u00a0Foundation, even though he was unhappy with the way Shelton ran the event.<\/p>\n

Hildebrand says, \u201cI told [Dorfman] that …\u00a0I did believe we should contribute the money that we raised to the Leap\u00a0Foundation, but the reason that it wasn\u2019t done that way in the first\u00a0place was that I was upset with the process and I felt Michael really\u00a0misled me and so I was deducting the expenses that I wasn\u2019t expecting.\u00a0[But] the check\u2018s already in the mail.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Advocate<\/em>\u00a0reached out to Shelton, Dorfman, or another representative of The\u00a0Leap Foundation for comment, but by\u00a0press time had received no response to calls and e-mails.<\/p>\n

Perhaps more than\u00a0anything else, Hildebrand says, he is fighting back because he\u2019s concerned this new brouhaha will\u00a0give his fans, supporters, and friends (to whom he sent an explanatory\u00a0e-mail of his own Wednesday) the wrong idea about his charitable work,\u00a0which he takes very seriously.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what Michael\u2019s\u00a0intention is … I don\u2019t know why he\u2019s being so vicious,\u201c Hildebrand says.\u00a0\u201cI\u2019m upset, I\u2019m hurt, and I\u2019m disappointed that my intention to do good\u00a0has been manipulated to make me look like a bad person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Originally published at <\/span>Advocate.com<\/span><\/a>. To read this post and more by Duane Wells at the Advocate, <\/span>click here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A little over a week ago, reality TV star Madison Hildebrand (pictured) was all smiles at Tthe Abbey in West Hollywood as he cohosted what was meant to be a celebratory event for the third-season finale of his hit Bravo series,\u00a0Million Dollar Listing. The event was also intended to raise money for the Leap Foundation, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88889,"featured_media":676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1590,1588],"tags":[1143,1164,1200],"class_list":["post-247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","category-culture","tag-interview","tag-hollywood","tag-glbt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88889"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5560,"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions\/5560"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}