RHOSLC’s Lisa Barlow Fires Back at Ex-Friend’s Claim That She Owes Him $410,000 as She Accuses Him of Concocting a “Fanciful Tale”

This season of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is going well for the cast. The fans are loving it, and the live viewership is pretty stable. However, Lisa Barlow has been involved in a massive lawsuit with a former friend for months. Now, she and her legal team are firing back at the suit and asking that the case be dismissed. 

Fans will recall that Bart Carlson, Lisa’s long-term friend, filed a $410,842.36 lawsuit against the RHOSLC star and her companies, Vida Tequila and Luxe Marketing, for unpaid loans from 2010 to 2018. In the suit, he claimed he sent her several transfers to help her pay bills. The suit also claims she made some payments to third parties in order to avoid her husband and business partners finding out about the loans.  Lisa is said to have told him her companies were “experiencing severe financial difficulties.”

Now, according to InTouch Weekly, Lisa and her legal team have entered a response to the claims. Her team says, “Lisa Barlow and Bart Carlson were one-time friends and business partners in a restaurant in Park City, Utah, called The Silver Restaurant. They sold that restaurant in 2016. While they had intermittent contact with each other afterwards, they went their separate ways and eventually ceased contact.”

The response from Lisa goes on to essentially call Bart’s claims lies. It reads, “Now, years later, 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.”

Beyond this, Lisa’s legal defense also questions the timing of the suit in relation to the statute of limitations. The court docs essentially say the case should be dismissed for this reason.

According to the docs, “[Bart’s] Complaint clearly demonstrates that the payments he contends he made were 14 years ago or similar date in the past. It is simply not equitable or Motion to Dismiss called for by the law to allow claims that have seemingly festered for over 10 years be brought now, especially since [Bart] is in fact a business owner. This unsound commercial practice should not be rewarded by allowing [Bart] to proceed forward.”

However, it should be noted that her request to have the case dismissed was denied by a judge on October 7th. 

After the request to dismiss was denied, Lisa and her legal team submitted an official answer to the court. In it, they say that “All acts or omissions of Barlow were undertaken in good faith, without malice or recklessness, and were fully justified and reasonable under the circumstance.”

They also say the claims are barred “to the extent they are based on unenforceable or invalid agreements.”

This is a developing story.