Reclusive billionaire Ty Warner said he’d be “delighted” to reconnect with a former Beanie Babies worker – after she called him out for a “gut punch” by diminishing her role in fueling the plush toy’s craze, The Post has learned.
Warner, 79, broke two decades of silence in an exclusive interview with The Post in August to decry the depiction of him as a manipulative, thin-skinned and cheap boss in a film about his toy company’s collapse, “The Beanie Bubble.
The movie, streaming on AppleTV, stars Zach Galifianakis as Warner and focuses on three women it credits for the Beanie Baby mania that are played by actresses Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Snook and Geraldine Viswanathan, whose character is based on Lina Trivedi.
Warner reemerged again weeks later after learning that his slight of Trivedi, one of the first people he hired at Ty Inc. in 1992, had reopened old scars for the single mother of a special needs child.
“Lina joined Ty Inc. and proved herself to be a talented young woman,” he told The Post. “I would be delighted to see her again and catch up. I wish her all the best.”
The about-face came after Warner, who has a net worth estimated at $5.6 billion, had told The Post “the admittedly fictional movie vastly overstates her role.”
“She certainly helped us get started in the internet space, which created a place for collectors to find out about new products and retirements. She also wrote many poems, but so did several other employees,” Warner said in the Aug. 31 interview.
Trivedi, now 50, was left floored by Warner’s callous comment. The two hadn’t spoken since she quit over her low pay in 1998.
“[It] felt like a punch to the gut if I’m going to be honest,” Trivedi recently told The Post.
“The [poems] after I left sucked. “Did you see the one about Cobra? ‘I kill rodents stone cold dead,’” Trivedi said.
Trivedi was an internet-savvy college student at DePaul University when she was the 12th person hired at Warner’s upstart Chicago toy company.
She also crafted the poems for the heart-shaped tags attached to the stuffed monkeys, lions and more than 100 other popular critters.
“People say the poem is what made people connect with them. That’s what gave them that character. And you’re going to minimize that?” she vented.
The Beanie Babies phenomenon helped the company rake in more than $1 billion in sales at the height of the mania in 1998.
However, she said her pay barely budged from her starting minimum wage salary of about $10 an hour. She was making $12 an hour when she finally quit.
The fed-up Trivedi walked out in 1998 after Warner offered her a paltry raise to “20 smackeroos,” according to the film.
“I’m not your secret weapon. I’m not a secret, and I’m not yours. I quit,” rails her character, named Maya.
Trivedi, who lives in Beaver Dam, Wis., has worked for social and political groups, and has authored a book on raising a special-needs child since parting ways with Ty Inc.
Despite the decades of silence between them, Trivedi said she attempted to reconnect with Warner after the release of the movie.
“Sometimes people do sh—y things to you,” she said. “And then you make up.”
“I wrote him a really heartfelt letter essentially telling him if he wanted to bring Beanie Babies back I’ve got some ideas,” she added. “I never got a reply.”
If the two do meet to bury the hatchet, Trivedi says she will pitch Warner on reviving the brand by updating her famous poems for today’s generation of kids – and their parents who first fell in love with the stuffed animals.
“They have Bongo the Monkey Lived in a Tree. He’s the happiest monkey you’ll ever see. In his spare time he plays the guitar. One of these days he’s going to be a big star.
“Now, 30 years later, we could say he is a big star and a master at playing guitar. Let’s show what happened in the last 30 years. Where did they go 30 years later?”
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