Jamie Foxx plays attorney Willie Gary in new movie "The Burial." Ex-clients say the real lawyer is a creep who screwed them out of millions.

• "The Burial" stars Jamie Foxx as real-life lawyer Willie Gary, who won a $500 million case in 1995.
• But Gary — who has a cameo in the movie and uses it in marketing — has been dogged by controversy.
• Ex-clients accuse him of sexual misconduct and cheating them out of money. Gary denies the claims.

When Ernestine Elliott lost her daughter Katrina in a 2014 car crash on a Georgia highway, she thought she was getting a great lawyer when Willie Gary came calling. He told her that she was looking at a "billion-dollar recovery," she said in court papers.

But Gary — who called himself "the giant killer" for wringing big settlements out of corporations like Disney and Ford — was asleep at the wheel, Elliott claimed in her lawsuit. She alleges that Gary blew a deadline to sue Nissan, which made Katrina's car, leading the case to be dismissed. It took almost two years for him to share the news with Elliott. And he never even sued the freight company whose driver smashed into Katrina's car. For all her hurt, and for all her waiting, Elliott alleged, she only got a check for $62,642.79.

Elliott isn't the only ex-client of Willie Gary and his firm, Gary Williams Parenti Watson & Gary, to be angry about how she was treated. Insider found dozens of ex-clients and a former secretary who said Gary engaged in sexual misconduct, bungled their cases, or took money they were owed, and spoke with six of them on the record.

Three of them told Insider they were outraged with Gary's glow-up in a new film from Amazon, "The Burial," where Jamie Foxx portrays him as an icon of "family, fairness, and basic decency," in the words of one film critic.

"I want to vomit when I open my email and I see all the advertisements with Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones," said Luisa Esposito, who accuses Gary of mishandling her case against a man who groped her. "Maybe there'll be a part two, where all the evidence comes out about how he stole millions."

Willie Gary's rags-to-riches story

Gary's rise from poverty to wealth is tailor-made for Hollywood. His father was a poor farmhand and Willie, born in 1947, "spent much of his early childhood in a whitewashed three-room shack with a tar-paper roof and no electricity or plumbing," according to a 1999 New Yorker story that was the inspiration for the new film.

While he spent much of his childhood working on vegetable farms, Gary made it through high school, went to college on a football scholarship, and then survived law school. He got a job in a Florida public defender's office for $25 a week, passed the bar exam, and started his own law firm in 1975 after the public defender couldn't afford to keep him on.

It didn't take long for him to develop an expertise in personal-injury cases. A $225,000 verdict here, a million-dollar judgment there, plus a $40 million settlement over a downed power line that electrocuted an entire family — by the 1990s, Gary and his growing firm were handling these cases at a steady clip. That's when the case that shot him to national stardom came calling.

"The Burial" tells the story of Gary's work for Jeremiah O'Keefe, a Mississippi undertaker who sued a funeral-home conglomerate called the Loewen Group for reneging on a business deal. Gary transformed a dry contract dispute into a morality play that cast O'Keefe as an anti-Klan war hero and Loewen's CEO as a wheeler-dealer who jacked up casket prices on poor Mississippians and owned a giant yacht.

The filmmakers take a degree of artistic license, but some of the zaniest elements, like Gary's use of a private jet called "Wings of Justice," are true to life. So was the $500 million verdict that Gary won for O'Keefe. It was so large, Loewen couldn't even afford to appeal it, paying around $175 million to settle the case. Loewen even tried to sue the US government, claiming Gary had whipped up jurors with eagle-humping, anti-Canadian rhetoric. (The effort failed.)

Gary seems to like the movie and Foxx's portrayal. A private screening was arranged for Gary and his friends and family, and the Gary Parenti Facebook and Instagram pages are packed with clips. And the real Willie Gary makes a cameo in a post-credits stinger, running into Foxx's Gary in a courthouse hallway and saying, "I want to be just like you when I grow up!"

Accusations of sex misconduct, theft, and conflicts of interest

But for every headline-grabbing case against a defendant like Loewen, Disney, or Anheuser-Busch, Gary's firm has handled scores of smaller ones. And it's in some of those cases where clients have turned on him.

In 2003, dozens of women who sued Ford and a contractor over sexist managers turned around and sued Gary, their own lawyer, alleging that he secretly schemed to pay himself more money than he got for his clients. Of the $16 million paid to settle the case, Gary and his firm helped themselves to over $9 million, according to court documents.

According to court records, Gary argued that he'd secured untold millions in "programmatic relief," or corporate policy changes. But unlike in a class action, where settlements are public, the Ford deal was hush-hush — so much so, one of the women alleges in the lawsuit, that one of Gary's cocounsels told her that she'd end up "in a body bag" if she didn't return a spreadsheet she was accidentally given that revealed the details.

Lawrence Fox, an ethics expert the women hired, said in a report to the court that the Gary firm did essentially no work for $6 million of the $9 million it received. The firm was "literally taking money out of the hands of their clients," he wrote. He called the Gary firm's behavior "unethical, even criminal." What's worse, Fox wrote, is that Gary "applied the very same modus operandi" when it sued other companies, which the report did not name.

According to the New Yorker, Gary also made an agreement with the Loewen Group that one ethics expert questioned. As part of its nine-figure settlement, the company paid Gary a $20,000-a-year retainer for three years upon settling the O'Keefe case so he couldn't sue them again, the New Yorker reported.

Such deals are banned under many states' ethics rules, according to Bruce Green, a law professor at Fordham. If businesses can pay to keep attorneys who win against them out of play, prospective clients can't hire a lawyer who knows the defendant's weak spots. Gary taking on Loewen as a client, Green said in an email, looks like a "pretext" to get around the ban.

The Ford case settled on confidential terms. At around the same time, some Black employees of Coca-Cola began to complain that Gary didn't deliver on his promises to get more money for them than they could've received through a $192 million class-action settlement.

One of the Coke employees, Sharron Mangum, said Gary sexually assaulted her in April 2002, when both of them were in New York City for the Coca-Cola shareholders' meeting. She said he made overtures for months, suggesting that she visit him in Florida and go on "intimate excursions." In a stretch limo in New York, she said, he began to touch her.

"Mr. Gary proceeded to roll up the dark, divider glass window inside the limousine, restricting any visual and audio contact of the driver," she wrote in a 2017 letter to the FBI. "Mr. Gary then attacked me — grabbing my breast, grabbing between my legs, forcibly placing my hand on his penis and trying to force his tongue into my mouth." In the letter, she said Gary only stopped when she threatened to jump out of the car.

One of Mangum's close friends, who asked not to be named, told Insider she recalled Mangum calling her about the episode shortly after it happened. And Marietta Goodman, another former client of Gary's in the Coke actions, said she remembered Mangum telling her about it, too.

Insider viewed copies of complaints Mangum said she filed against Gary with the Florida Bar Association in 2003 and again in 2021 which mentioned her claims of Gary's sexual misconduct, and the letter she wrote to the FBI. Neither complaint resulted in discipline, and Gary was never criminally charged.

In 2007, one of Gary's secretaries, Jillian Nedd, accused him of rape. After police dropped a criminal investigation, Gary sued her for extortion. (According to the Palm Beach Post, the suit ended in 2008 with Nedd and two co-defendants paying Gary $100 each.) In turn, Nedd sued Gary, claiming "sexual battery and rape." Nedd's lawsuit settled in 2010. Neither side revealed the terms of that settlement, though Palm Beach Post reported that other women had been interviewed as part of the discovery process.

More recently, a Georgia woman named Ardria Clark sued Gary, claiming that he took money from a car-crash settlement he'd won for Clark's mother and secretly paid it to Clark's sister, Tamesha Marshall-Pharr, who Clark claims was having sex with one of Gary's sons and possibly with Gary himself. Marshall-Pharr was murdered by her husband after he found out, Clark claimed. The case is pending.

'Giant killer' or 'client killer?'

Ray Rogers, a consultant for activists and unions, has become a persistent thorn in Gary's side. He hosts years worth of legal filings and testimonies on a site he runs called TheClientKiller.org, a play on Gary's "giant killer" moniker, and since 2021, he has run a website urging Amazon to "Bury 'The Burial.'" He's tried to buy a billboard bashing Gary in his hometown and leafleted at his public appearances to try to stop people from hiring him.

"I kept him out of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis," said Rogers.

Some of Gary's upset clients filed complaints with the Florida bar, but none of them appear to have gone anywhere. (He was lightly disciplined by the state bar twice, once in 1993 and once in 1994.) Willie Lewis, whose stepfather Troy Fulks Jr. hired Gary to go after Florida Power & Light after most of his family was electrocuted by a downed line, said Fulks was supposed to get the lion's share of a reported $40 million settlement.

Lewis said Fulks was a barely literate farm worker who didn't have anybody looking out for him, and he still hangs on to decades-old records of disbursements and court records in hopes of getting answers. He and Rogers say they've only found records of about $3 million in disbursements and say Gary never accounted for where the money went.

In a response to a bar complaint, Gary said he had long since thrown out Fulks' file, but said it's possible that Fulks sold his structured settlement payments to a third party for dimes on the dollar. Lewis rejected that claim. "You can't sell what you don't have," he said in a text message.

Esposito, the woman who hired Gary to go after another lawyer who allegedly groped her and solicited sex from her, said Gary "just walked off into the sunset" after they lost a key motion.

After she received evidence from a lender that Gary had paid back money she'd borrowed against her case, Esposito asserted in a court filing that he secretly settled her case and kept the money. Gary told Florida bar officials that he had done no such thing, and said Esposito's case had major weaknesses that he tried to help her overcome.

The lawsuits are ongoing. Elliott, whose daughter was killed in a Georgia car wreck, accused Gary and his firm of malpractice. She settled her case against him last fall — and Gary's firm promptly missed a payment, leading the $579,000 settlement to become public. She has so far managed to seize $102,000 from an account the Gary firm had with Truist.

Elliott called Gary a "monster" and "scum of the earth" and said she was upset that he's the subject of a movie. She said he showed up to a mediation last year with a cane and that his lawyer claimed he was suffering from memory problems. Gary, she said, never apologized — and when they passed in the hall, he didn't even meet her gaze.

"The person that he claims to be in this movie is totally a lie," she said. "For a person that can't remember, can't hardly walk, but you're making movies, you're flying in and out of the country -- how are you doing this with no money?"

There are other signs that Gary might not be quite what he used to be. He and his firm had legal scuffles with the IRS and creditors in 2012. As recently as this August, the lender Law Finance Group registered a $5 million judgment against Gary and his firm in Florida state court.

His old "Wings of Justice" jet has been scrapped, and the federal registration on "Wings of Justice II," a luxuriously appointed Boeing 737, lapsed in 2018; the last photograph that Insider could find of the jet showed it apparently mothballed at a Florida airport in 2017.

The Gary Foundation, a family foundation, hasn't reported more than $50,000 in annual revenue to the IRS since at least 2011, when it had just $10,000 on hand. But a piece authored by Gary's PR person Debra Sweeting earlier this year refers to the foundation as though it's still active, and says he "often travels" on the jet.

Gary didn't respond to emails for this story. Asked about the allegations on Rogers' websites, Sweeting said, "we're not interested in commenting on bogus websites."

Amazon quietly released "The Burial" in theaters for one week before it debuts on streaming, a move a studio often makes when they believe that they have a potential award-winning film on its hands. Variety has called the movie a Best Picture contender, albeit one with an outside chance of winning.

Gary's angry ex-clients don't want awards buzz to drown out their demands for accountability.

"I'd like Jamie Foxx to see this shit," said Lewis. "I really would."