The name Caitlin Sanchez may not be well known, but her voice is. The 14-year old voiced the character of Dora in Nickelodeon’s hot show ‘Dora The Explorer’. When Sanchez first uttered the lines “lets go on an adventure” as the lovable adventuress Dora, she would have never known just how sour the adventure would turn out to be.
Sanchez was hired for the voice of Dora at the tender age of 12. She was paid $5,115 per episode. She was fired from the role because at 14, she no longer provided the right sounding voice for Dora. The teen is now suing the Nickelodeon, MTV as well as Viacom in a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
Sanchez maintains that she was forced into signing an "unconscionable" contract, without the supervision of an attorney, or negotiations. Her parents and agent, now said to have been very inexperienced, were present when the teen was given an alleged 22 minutes to sign the contract, or lose the deal.
Furthermore, network representatives allegedly promised Sanchez a cut of lucrative merchandising and residuals on the brand. The network, according to the 35-page complaint, used “convoluted payment deduction clauses and additional free services provisions to underpay Caitlin for her acting and recordings, force her to work hundreds of hours marketing the Dora Brand for free ... and withhold her residual payments and merchandise percentages, all contrary to what she was originally promised."
The lawsuit has called into question Nickelodeon’s practices when hiring minors, as the contract was never submitted to a court for approval, as is standard procedure in Hollywood when dealing with minors.
