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# Judge: Former employee, friend must pay back loan
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/judge-former-employee-friend-must-pay-back-loan/
- Published: 2003-03-28T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T01:56:11.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Crime, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*By DAVE DANFORTH Daily Press Staff Writer*

It took Judge Diana Wheatley just 60 seconds to issue her ruling Tuesday in a case about the $10,000 in limbo when a decade-long local friendship went sour.

Wheatley ruled that Sam Ashenofsky couldn’t get off the hook for a $10,000 loan to boss and friend Jerome Sachs, and must pay it back.

The case, all agreed, was about principle and is typical of the kind of case that should have been settled. But the Ashenofsky-Sachs dispute, bitter as it was, didn’t go before a jury. The case was tried directly by Wheatley in Superior Court.

Wheatley didn’t wait long to hint that she considered Ashenofsky’s argument that Sachs had forgiven the loan, as he’d forgiven many others over the years, to have been concocted “after the fact.”

The dispute apparently began in 1999 over the taking of a computer and ended a long Santa Monica friendship by most accounts. It had its roots before 1996, when Ashenofsky was tapped to run Sachs’ Network of Independent Broadcasters, a service which bought advertising on a “non-wired” group of non-network television stations. By the time the network wound down in 1999, Ashenofsky was making $150,000 annually, according to testimony.

Part of his pay involved loans from NIB that were later forgiven. According to testimony, Sachs authorized four or five $5,000-plus loans to Ashenofsky. Later, Ashenofsky would be told he wouldn’t have to re-pay them and they effectively converted to income.

Sachs and Ashenofsky differed about whether theirs was simply a business relationship or also a friendship. Ashenofsky testified he was simply Sachs’ “employee,” but Judge Wheatley appeared to doubt the characterization after several others testified that the pair were friends, lived near each other by the Santa Monica coastline, walked dogs together and appeared at the same parties.

The difference would be critical. Ashenofsky claimed that he drove Sachs, who suffered a stroke in 1996, to a gym for therapy three times a week in 1999\. He characterized this as a $43 an hour job.

During Ashenofsky lawyer Glenn Stevens’ closing argument, Wheatley interrupted. She questioned whether Sachs would have hired Ashenofsky had Sachs known he’d get billed $40-plus an hour for a driver.

“If he knew it would cost that much on Sunday, he could’ve thought of someone else,” Wheatley said. Sachs already had a regular employee who drove him during weekdays.

Wheatley also suggested that Ashenofsky’s denial of his friendship with Sachs was dubious and calculated to fit into his legal argument that the driving was just a job.

“It’s not unreasonable that Sachs would forgive the note as a sign of friendship,” she advised Stevens, an apparent hint that he didn’t have to deny the friendship to prevail.

The case hinged on whether Ashenofsky could prove an agreement, without a signed note, in which Sachs had forgiven the final $10,000 note. Stevens argued that such forgiveness fit the pattern of prior notes. But Sachs’ attorney, Jack Samuels, pointed out that the final $10,000 was lent by Sachs personally and not through NIB.

And Sachs, who testified in a wheelchair surrounded by a group of employees and friends, exclaimed, “He lies,” several times when asked why Ashenofsky said the loan had been forgiven.

Wheatley ruled that the most believable story was that Ashenofksy’s case was an “after the fact thing.” She held that because the prior loans had been forgiven in a “businesslike way,” she doubted Sachs would forgive the last one in an “off-handed” moment in a car, as Ashenofsky had claimed.

Sachs said afterwards that he’d have taken as little as $10 per month if Ashenofsky, who periodically pled poverty, had owned up to the debt. Such a payment wouldn’t even have paid the 6 percent interest due on the note. But Samuels pointed out that Sachs had sued on “principle” after Ashenofsky declined to acknowledge the debt.

It’s unknown what the short trial cost in attorney fees or whether Sachs can reasonably collect the loan from his apparent former friend.

NIB had offices on Wilshire Boulevard just outside Santa Monica until it closed in late 1999\. Sachs was also known for his operation of Sachs, Finley — an ad agency that made its name as a buyer for toy companies.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 28, 2003.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/032803.pdf?ref=smdp.com)