Heather Catania Con artist. Scammer. Known to deceive freelancers and startups, fabricates invoices and email records to emulate her falsehoods. Los Angeles, CA Internet
Before I met Heather, I was warned about Heather. By a friend who helped operate a magazine for several years. By a sound mixer who had been screwed over on one of her productions. By at booker at a top modeling agency who told me her name was blacklisted by 2-3 OTHER agencies. But still, I was a desperate freelancer and $400 is $400.
My personal experience isn't that interesting. Heather brought me on for a project, I did the project and delivered the product and after (literally) six months of bugging her, I sent her some small claims court PDFs I found online. Miraciously, she found the time to return my emais and I finally got paid.
A more interesting story is what happened to my close friend who was brought on to shoot a lookbook for a Yucatan-based fashion startup. Heather hit her up telling her it was a super ultra low budget shoot for a super sweet startup, a lookbook and a linesheet for a set photographer budget of 1k. Ok, she tells her, and they start shooting.
About halfway through the process, Heather disappears. The client starts panicking, circumvents Heather who was operating as a sort of middle-person and contacts the photographer. Through several days of back and forth, we discover that the brand had paid Heather over 10k USD to produce the shoot, which means she took a 9k cut off the top and reserved the last measly 1k to hire some freelancers for her "super ultra low budget" startup shoot.
Heather never reappears. The photographer doesn't get paid her 1k, and she finishes the project with the brand directly to make sure they get their content together by their launch date.
All this while her Instgram is lighting up announcing her newest venture selling an e-book or something on social success. I wonder if there's anyting in there about treating the people you work with respect and common decency.