Tyler Perry remembers the Friday nights when his father, a construction subcontractor, came home broke, stiffed by his bosses for the week’s pay.

“That’s an awful feeling,” Perry, the Atlanta-based movie producer and director, said. “I wouldn’t pass that on or wish that on anybody.”

Perry tells the story in the fading sunlight of a cold afternoon outside his new house, a 30,000-square-foot palace atop a hill overlooking the Chattahoochee River. It is the filmmaker’s way of rebutting an alternative narrative that emerges from documents filed in Fulton County courts — the claims by several construction firms that Perry gave them the same kind of treatment his father received.

Six construction firms have filed liens against Perry’s house and his new movie studio, the first established by an African-American.

The court papers show that Perry’s unpaid bills from the two projects total slightly less than $200,000.

The contractors allege Perry refused to pay their final bills either for no apparent reason or because their work met with his arbitrary disapproval. They say he ordered work redone on impulse, deciding he wouldn’t like the stones purchased for an outdoor fountain, for instance, or deeming newly planted trees too short.

“He wanted to do it his way,” said Brooks Hilton, a landscaping contractor who said Perry owes him $17,635. “He wouldn’t take any advice. I guess in Hollywood it works that way, but not in real life.”

Perry, though, said he withheld payment only for shoddy work or for undocumented charges and then only for a handful of the dozens of construction companies he hired. Even those, he said, still got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each before he dismissed them.

He sees the contractors’ complaints as a form of extortion and as part of the burden of celebrity.

“There’s a Tyler Perry tax that’s put on things,” Perry said in one of two interviews last week.

“I’ve seen the worst of what people can be, the worst of what family members can be,” he said.

“I pride myself on taking care of my business. I pride myself on being able to pay the bills.”

But “I’m not sympathetic to anybody who’s trying to rip me off. Just because I’m a Christian, just because I’m a nice guy, it doesn’t mean I’m a wimp.”

Continue..

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