Legal News

For Disney Tipper, There?s No Place Like Home

By Chad Bray

This just in: A former Walt Disney Co. administrative assistant will serve four months home detention after admitting last year to engaging in a scheme with her then-boyfriend to sell early access to the company’s earnings.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan alleged that Bonnie Hoxie, the former assistant to Disney’s head of communications, agreed to give her former boyfriend, Yonni Sebbag, information about the company’s upcoming results before they were announced.

Sebbag then reached out to dozens of hedge funds and investment companies last March and offered to provide an early look at Disney’s earnings. Sebbag then agreed to provide the information for $15,000 he received from FBI agents posing as hedge-fund traders.

Hoxie and Sebbage pleaded guilty to criminal charges last year and Sebbag has been sentenced to 27 months in prison.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ordered Hoxie to serve three years probation–four months of which would be served as home detention.

“I was blindsided by love in not making the correct choices,” Hoxie said Tuesday.

Robert Baum, Hoxie’s lawyer, said she didn’t know the extent of scheme. She believed Sebbag, who was undergoing financial difficulty, might make an investment with the information, Baum said.

On the day Disney’s earnings were released, Hoxie allegedly told Sebbag that she wanted a $700 designer handbag and pair of shoes that complemented the bag.

“She received nothing. She asked her boyfriend to buy her a nice, designer pocketbook and a nice pair of shoes,” Baum said. “That’s the gain she hoped to get.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 22, 2011 (boomark / email).