A little less than two weeks after it was announced that St. Louis businessman Chris Keating was selling Sauce Magazine to STL Bucketlist, the former owner of Sauce is now suing Keating, claiming he never paid her in full for the magazine.
According to a lawsuit filed this morning by Sauce founder Allyson Mace, Keating agreed to pay her $479,000 for the business in October 2023. He paid her $99,000 up front and entered into a promissory note for the remaining $380,000.
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Keating made four subsequent payments, but then began missing payments of around $78,000 on a regular basis starting in July 2024. At the time that he sold Sauce to the Bucketlist, he still owed Mace $168,333, the suit says.
The initial missed payments last July came a few months after Keating sold the Riverfront Times to a pornography-related concern and the alt-weekly’s entire staff was laid off.
In a very St. Louis twist, the attorney representing Mace, Al Watkins, operates out of the third floor of the Mercantile Fair Building on Shaw Avenue on The Hill; Keating is on the first floor.
“I’m not sure Mr. Keating enjoys the fact that I’m sniffing in his kitty litter every day,” Watkins quips.
Says Watkins of the suit: “This is not a nuanced fact situation. This is really simple. Someone owes money and they need to pay it.”
Keating’s attorney Lauren P. DeSantis-Then says that she disputes basically everything in Mace’s suit.
She says that filing the lawsuit is in complete violation of the contract under which Mace sold Sauce to Keating. “There was a mandatory agreement to mediate, which we were doing,” she says.
She calls the suit “bizarre,” adding, “We’ll obviously be responding accordingly.”
Earlier this month, Keating was also hit with a lawsuit from SoFi Bank, which said that they were owed a little more than $27,000 from Keating stemming from a loan he took out from the bank.
Keating tells SLM it was a personal loan, taken out to help his wife purchase a tent company, that had nothing to do with Sauce or the Riverfront Times’ former parent company, Big Lou Holdings. He said the matter is well on its way to being resolved. “This was a personal debt that I forgot about and already reached out to settle it,” he texted.
