Talent show performer fails in attempt to sue Cowell

A former Britain's Got Talent hopeful who blamed health problems for her poor audition failed yesterday in her attempt to take her case to a tribunal.

Emma Czikai, who wanted to sue Simon Cowell and his hit show for discrimination, has argued the talent judge should not have allowed her audition to be broadcast after she told him of her difficulties.

But yesterday she was denied permission to bring a tribunal against Fremantle Media and Cowell’s television company Simco.

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The decision was made following a pre-hearing review in central London and was based on the amount of time that had lapsed since the incident and the fact that Cowell was not her employer, she said.

The 54-year-old, from Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands, has claimed she suffered discrimination because of her disabilities because Fremantle Media and Simco did not do enough to support her.

But she was not disappointed with yesterday’s decision, she said, as she had grown “sick of the whole thing”.

She said: “My life has changed so markedly, now all I want to do is just forget about everything. I would rather walk away from it.

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“I’ve done as much as I can to bring it to the public’s attention.”

She said the written decision on her case accepted that Cowell was a potential employer, and she welcomed the possibility she believed this opened up for a tribunal on those grounds brought by any future contestants.

Miss Czikai said she suffers from fibromyalgia, which causes painful swelling all over the body and extreme tiredness, as well as spondylosis in her neck. Health problems made her give up working as a nurse and she retrained as a psychology teacher and then as a barrister. She lost a lot of weight after her mother’s death in 2006 and was recovering from an operation to remove excess skin from her arms when she went before the show’s judges in January last year.

Miss Czikai said her arms were painful and swollen and she struggled to hold the microphone close to her mouth.

She holds Cowell responsible for her public humiliation.

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Footage of Miss Czikai’s poor performance of Westlife’s You Raise Me Up was posted on YouTube by Fremantle Media and Miss Czikai argues that allowing repeated viewings, without a link to an improved performance recorded for the spin-off show Britain’s Got More Talent, “was an act of harassment perpetrated in the full knowledge of the fact I was being degraded and humiliated because of illnesses”

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