Retired executive, matchmaker settle over bad dates
PHILADELPHIA — A retired corporate executive said in a lawsuit that she spent $150,000 on a matchmaking service that set her up with a string of highly incompatible suitors, including men who were married, mentally unstable or felons.
Darlene Daggett, former president for U.S. commerce for the West Chester, Pa.-based home shopping channel QVC, settled the lawsuit against Corte Madera, Calif.-based Kelleher International hours after it was filed in federal court last week, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Kelleher’s chief executive, Amber Kelleher-Andrews, a former actress who appeared on “Baywatch” and “Melrose Place,” said in a statement that her company is responsible for thousands of marriages over the years.
“It doesn’t always work out,” Kelleher-Andrews told the newspaper. She said her company works to end courtships “fairly and reasonably.”
According to the lawsuit, the 62-year-old Daggett, a divorced mother of four, wanted someone to spend her retirement with, and she felt “social dating sites did not provide her with the degree of screening and privacy she was looking for.”
She said she paid $150,000 for a “CEO Level” membership with Kelleher International that guaranteed her matches from around the globe but then endured a series of bad courtships that fell short of what the dating service promised.
Daggett also dated a senior executive of a Fortune 500 company for months, she said. The lawsuit refers to him only as “the Serial Lothario.”