Author of the week

last updated 8 January 2015

Right now might seem an inopportune time for Deborah Gregory to blast the Walt Disney Co., said Margena A. Christian in Jet. As the author of Disney’s best-selling Cheetah Girls books prepares to launch a new juvenile fiction series, Hollywood studios are again showing interest. But Gregory refuses to play it safe. She says she hasn’t seen a cent of the millions that Disney’s made since 2003 from Cheetah Girls soundtracks, concert tickets, backpacks, and toothbrushes. She’s speaking out about how Hollywood took advantage of her, so that other writers don’t repeat the mistake. “I grew up in foster care,” she says. “Who I am in this world is about teaching and it’s about sharing. I’m going to risk it a little just to tell the truth.”

Gregory knows that hers is an old story, said Josh Getlin in the Los Angeles Times. Hollywood is famous for accounting rules that cut out anyone who’s promised only a share of a franchise’s “net profits.” What bothers her is that Disney made her feel that there would be no deal at all if she pushed for better terms. The irony, she says, is that her goal in creating Cheetah Girls, a pop group comprising four black and Latina friends, was to teach kids that creative people are rewarded in America. “What the Cheetah Girls represents to me,” she says, “is a chance to get out of the ghetto—a chance to transcend your background through sheer talent.”