WHAT A HEEL!: Calif. Couple Takes In Five Orphans To Get Extreme Home Makeover – Then Kicks Them To The Curb
Firipeli and Lokilani Leomiti may be church-goers, but The Stiletto suspects that they sleep through the sermons:
On Easter Sunday 2005, ABC's Extreme Makeover Home Edition aired an especially poignant episode. Five children, ages 14-21, from the Higgins family were orphaned. A couple from their church, with three children of their own, took them in. The result was 10 people living in cramped quarters.
The show finds families like these and, in the course of a week, rebuilds their home from scratch. …
The rebuilt home is always astonishingly beautiful and completely furnished. In the Easter Sunday special, the rebuilt home had nine bedrooms, including one for each child. …
The Higgins' happy ending did not last. The family that took them in asked them to leave the beautiful nine-bedroom home because it did not belong to the Higgins.
The eldest child, Charles Higgins, who is also legal guardian for the minor children, contacted the producers … Apparently the 24-page single spaced contract did not give the Higgins any right to the home built as a result of their tragedy. It did, however, give ABC the rights to their story and the episode was rebroadcast complete with happy ending after the Higgins children were already evicted.
The California Court of Appeals ruled that the arbitration clause of the ABC contract was procedurally and sustantively “unconscionable, and, therefore unenforceable." The decision clears the way for the orphans to sue the Leomitis family, American Broadcasting Companies, Inc., Disney/ABC International Television, Inc., the program’s producers and the home-building company that did the renovation for that episode.
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