A group of building contractors have been telling anyone who will listen that filmmaker Tyler Perry stiffed them for slightly less than $200,000 for work they did building his new 30,000-square-foot mansion.

Now it’s Perry's time to talk.

Perry, who lives in Atlanta, tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he had good reason to withhold payment. In an article today, Perry said he fired the contractors because their work was unsatisfactory.

He gave the AJC’s Alan Judd a tour of his 17-acre estate, pointing out flaws he said were left behind by the builders: Dying trees and shrubs. A leaky pool. Mismatched masonry.

The contractors in December sued Perry in Fulton County courts and placed a series of liens on his home, the value of which he declined to disclose to the AJC.

Perry, who recently opened the nation’s first black movie studio in southwest Atlanta and earned $125 million between June 2007 and June 2008, according to Forbes magazine, said he could easily pay the disputed amounts, simply to make the lawsuits go away. But he plans to fight it out.

He called the lawsuits a “Tyler Perry tax.”

“It is so unfair to be targeted that way,” he told the AJC.

“Every person I know who has come from where I come from and who has had some level of success deals with this: ‘Because you have it, you should give some to me.’ I don’t mind sharing, but don’t try to extort it from me,” he told the Atlanta paper.

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