Lisa Barlow mounted an impassioned defense of her businesses on Tuesday night’s episode of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” — as other cast members continue to raise questions about lawsuits filed against her.
Some of those lawsuits have been dismissed — which Barlow proclaimed on big “DISMISSED” poster boards she presented during a lunch she staged to confront some of her cast members.
But one lawsuit, as cast members Bronwyn Newport and Angie Katsanevas point out, is still working its way through the court system.
Here’s what court records indicate about the lawsuits that have been filed against Barlow, her husband, John, and their tequila and party-planning businesses.
The lawsuit that’s still pending
The lawsuit that’s still being litigated was filed in June 2024 by Bart Carlson and Yukon Construction, a Park City homebuilding company. Carlson is the company’s president.
In the lawsuit, Carlson and Yukon argue Lisa Barlow and her companies — Vida Tequila and Luxe Marketing — have not paid back more than $410,000 in loans, some of them dating back to 2010.
The complaint alleges Lisa Barlow shared around May 2010 that she was “experiencing severe financial difficulties.” It notes Carlson, at Barlow’s request, loaned her money to keep Vida and Luxe afloat.
Carlson, in the lawsuit, said the two agreed not to specify a time for repayment “because of his longtime friendship with Barlow and her family.”
When the lawsuit was filed, Barlow in a statement called Carlson’s allegations “untrue” and added that “I pay my bills and obligations and I always have.”
She also stressed that Carlson had no interest in either of her companies and did not invest in those businesses.
In August 2024, Barlow’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the suit, which read in part, “Carlson has concocted a fanciful tale in which he purports to have bankrolled Barlow and her companies with an open line of credit that had no terms or conditions and no repayment date.”
Barlow, on Tuesday’s episode of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” repeats the phrase “fanciful tale” several times when confronted by Newport and fellow cast member Whitney Rose.
Several accusations in Carlson’s complaint are repeated by Newport and Rose during their confrontation.
• An allegation that Carlson started an American Express account for Barlow, and paid more than $119,000 in charges made between 2011 and 2017.
• An allegation that Carlson made some loans to Lisa Barlow through her attorney, so her husband, John, would not find about Vida Tequila’s financial problems.
• An allegation that when Carlson asked Barlow to repay the loans, she brushed the request aside with a December 2019 text message that had the all-caps word “OVERWHELMED” and a “palm-face” emoji.
As of Tuesday, Carlson’s lawsuit remains pending.
The dismissed lawsuits
Barlow is correct when she tells the other cast members that several lawsuits against her have been dismissed.
One of them, filed by William McGeary on behalf of his family’s trust, alleged John Barlow had made a deal with McGeary’s son, David, to loan $400,000 to the Barlows and their company, Vida Tequila, to obtain raw materials for making tequila.
McGeary filed that complaint on Aug. 13, 2024, then filed a dismissal notice two days later.
In another, filed in April 2020, a Weber County man accused the Barlows and Vida Tequila of owing him just over $27,000. The man filed a dismissal notice a month later.
In 2021, the Utah State Tax Commission filed two judgments for tax liens against the Barlows, one in July for $12,029.97, and the other in December for $4,114.96. Both judgments were withdrawn a month after they were filed.
What Lisa Barlow has said
On Tuesday’s episode, Lisa Barlow invites all the cast members to lunch at The Lodge at Blue Sky, north of Park City.
The poster boards, which feature blown-up images of court documents, are displayed all around the lunch table, greeting cast members as they arrive. A smaller version is printed on the menus.
Cast member Meredith Marks, who has a law degree, says in a confessional, “In my expert legal opinion, I don’t think that these posters are what you would normally use as exhibits in the courtroom. However, they get the point across.”
Heather Gay is dismissive of the posters. “It’s like a science fair, but nobody actually did their project,” Gay says in confessional.
“You can allege anything,” Barlow says in confessional before the lunch confrontation.
“People can sue you for anything,” she continues. “You can look at someone the wrong way, they can sue you. … Sometimes, they think because you have too many Chanel bags, they should have those Chanel bags, so they sue you for those, too.”