Judge Judy: Plays Hard Ball For Her $47M

Judge Judy laid down the law while negotiating her hefty $47-million-a-year salary, she said in a newly unveiled deposition.

CBS had “no choice” but to pay the no-nonsense jurist what she wanted, lest she produce the show herself, she said.

“Their back’s to the wall,” Judy Sheindlin bragged about CBS’s bargaining position, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “I can produce this show myself.”

According to Page Six at The NYPost, she said she uses the threat while negotiating with CBS’s president during a meal every three years, in which she hands over a list of demands, including calls for pay raises.

“We sit across the table, and I hand him the envelope and I say, ‘Don’t read it now, let’s have a nice dinner. Call me tomorrow. You want it, fine. Otherwise, I’ll produce it myself,” she testified.

One year, when then-CBS head John Nogawski brought his own envelope, she flatly told him: “This isn’t a negotiation.”

The Brooklyn-born Sheind­lin was testifying in a suit brought against her bosses that claims the network pays her too much. Plaintiff Rebel Entertainment is due 5 percent of the show’s net profits, because it is the successor to the talent group that originally packaged the program back in the 1990s.

The company argues it has not been paid enough, because an overcompensated Sheindlin is eating into the show’s profits. The tough-taking judge shot back that Rebel’s chief, Richard Lawrence, has made a mint off a show he worked very little on and walked away from decades ago.