A Bay Area circus troupe on Tuesday will hold a fundraiser to try and recoup the $20,000 it says it's owed by a Bay Area tech leader for a party he threw last summer.
Dahlias Entertainment, an Asian-American led circus troupe based in the Bay Area, will stage the fundraiser virtually, and in-person in Los Angeles. The group accused prominent tech leader Japheth Dillman of failing to pay-up after he hired the group to perform at a private party at a Sonoma County winery.
Last April -- six months after the party -- the FBI arrested Dillman, general partner of the Block Fits fund, and accused him of defrauding investors in a San Francisco-based cryptocurrency trading fund. The news rattled Lee, co-founder of the Dahlias who had been trying unsuccessfully to collect payment from Dillman.
"So when this happened I couldn’t even process it," said Lee, an aerial artist who performed at the event. "I was like how was this even possible?"
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Lee knew Dillman from her time in the tech world, before she left to pursue her full-time dreams of performing in a circus troupe. He had taken care of her dog. She sat on panels with him. So when Dillman reached out to hire the Dahlias, which had been on hiatus since the start of the pandemic, Lee was thrilled.
"And he kept saying things like triple the budget, pay performers three times the amount, pay for all the flights," Lee said. "We were so excited that somebody actually wanted to treat circus performers."
Lee said she and Dillman had agreed on a $20,000 verbal contract for the performance. She said Dillman encouraged her to hire more performers -- saying he wanted to help the group knowing it had suffered as all its bookings dried up in the pandemic. Since she knew Dillman, it silenced some of the warning bells going off in Lee's mind.
"Usually we take a 50% deposit before a show," Lee said, "And I kept asking him to send it and he kept saying don’t worry I’m going to get it to you the next day."
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There was no hint of trouble the day of the party. Lee said about twenty guests, including Dillman, watched magicians, hoopers, and an aerial show as a costumed violinist played along.
The guests next headed inside a wine barrel lined room for dinner, as performers did their act. Lee and Sawant hired the performers and crew and paid them from the group's pocket.
"We were just over the moon," said Sawant. "We were so excited to be back and to be performing alongside our other performers, some who we hadn’t seen in two years."
But those good vibes wore off as days became weeks and then months, and the group still hadn't been paid by Dillman.
"We waited, we pushed, and for the next year I contacted him almost every day asking him for payment," Lee said, "he kept coming up with different excuses."
Dillman, who didn't respond to several requests for comment, reportedly told the online tech publication Venture Beat that he is in dispute with the group over a contract he said he never signed. He told the publication he was in the process of settling "that personal matter."
But in texts Lee provided from Dillman, he appeared to apologize for the delay in payment and said "I'll be overpaying significantly even though you haven't asked for that."
In another text Lee produced, Dillman offered to increase the payment to the group to $50,000 to make up for the hassle.
"He said that he really wanted to take care of the community," Lee said, "and it really made me not want to trust anyone."
During that bleak period of the pandemic, as the Dahlias were hoping to climb out of the doldrums of the pandemic, they instead found themselves saddled with thousands of dollars in debt.
The group has now made back $11,000 of the lost money through a fundraising drive on Facebook. Its fundraiser show on Tuesday August 23 will take place both virtually, and with an in-person performance at 2529 Kelton Avenue in Los Angeles.
Sawant said even though the performance was a financial disaster, it helped spark a comeback.
"Even though we hadn’t been paid," Sawant said, "we still believed we were going to be and so we carried this confidence and energy forward and it brought us a lot of larger events after that."
For Lee, the community support has propelled the group ahead. The Dahlias calendar is once again filling up with gigs and she hopes it will help them expand and grow.
"Such an amazing feeling of gratitude," Lee said, "to have gone through such a dark time, but also to see how much hope there is and how much support there is from the community."
